Cinemartyrs

When a young independent director sets out to shoot a film about a historical massacre, she learns some hard lessons about waking up the ghosts of a past drenched in blood and suffering. A multi-layered essay that also explores the almost-forgotten history of women filmmakers in 1940s–50s Philippine cinema!

Where to begin with this extremely multi-layered work? Maybe with Sari Dalena’s first feature-length work, Memories of a Forgotten War (co-dir Camilla Benolirao Griggers, 2001), an essay on the Philippine-American War as the template for most armed conflicts in the 20th century, which some might still remember from its screening here at IFFR in 2010.

One way to describe Cinemartyrs would be: a meta movie about the making of Dalena’s debut, and the lessons she learned from it – what toll it takes to recreate a past drenched in blood and suffering, to shoot genocides on a shoestring budget. Into this narrative thread, Dalena weaves various other lines of thought and investigations, one of which concerns the history of women’s filmmaking in the local industry’s heyday, when under-acknowledged directors like Susana de Guzman and Consuelo Osorio were studio stalwarts hammering out hit after hit, inserting unexpected levels of subversion into the popular genre brew. Which all leads up to the question: Why do we forget, and how?

– Olaf Möller

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