The Family That Eats Soil

is a very outspoken experimental film maker with a prolific rate of production and an uninhibited lust to investigate and cross all frontiers. This film also displays clear traces of furious improvisations and a nonchalant provocative manner. In Filipino society, the family is holy, like the earth, because the society is basically still agrarian. In the bizarre and surrealistic world of The Family That Eats Soil, a strange and dysfunctional family sits down three times a day to a meal of soil. Outside the meal times, the individual family members experience extravagant adventures. A summary of several characters is telling: Baby escapes from his crib to a cockfighting arena, Sister is a nymphomaniac prostitute, Brother beats someone’s skull in, Father has mixed up a potion of poison that he wants to give children in hospital, Mother is a clever drug dealer and media personality and Grandpa is really already dead.This absurdist demonstration of insanity and spluttering violence is clearly related to the tradition of underground, splatter, gore and cult, but there is more to it for the director. For instance, he’s interested in tackling the issue of ubiquitous violence in the history of the Philippines that in fact continues into the present day. In this film, all traditional values are turned upside down and sent in the wrong direction. And with verve. (GjZ)