Kamera obskura

The film opens with three real-life Filipino film archivists, who call a press conference to announce that an old film has been discovered in a warehouse. Only the credits and the finale are missing, which makes the discovery extra mysterious. With its stylisation in the vein of German expressionism and Russian formalism, the black-and-white feature film is dated from the late 1920s, although no comparable films were made in the Philippines in this era.
For Raymond Red this project was an ambitious exercise both on a stylistic and conceptual level. The main character steps out of his cell as if it were Plato’s Cave, and the rest of the script is also heavy on metaphors about power and corruption. The background is full of references to local and colonial history.
The choice of electronic music instead of a more traditional piano partition, is the most deliberate anachronism in the film.

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