Rafael Manuel’s new indie feature “Filipiñana,” which opens Friday in New York, is set against a backdrop of oppressive heat and drought. The narrative follows Isabel, a 17-year-old from the provinces of the Philippines, who gets a job at a prestigious golf resort.
Manuel felt the golf course was the perfect setting for the film to explore societal inequities in the country. With the very first courses established on American military bases, the local elite eventually took over, making the golf course a center of power.
In his framing, the country club members are presented high in the frame to show the hierarchy structure, and the servants are presented low in the frame — an early shot shows Isabel sitting on the grass as she places a ball on the tee for a club member.
Manuel says, “That’s what attracted me to the golf course.” He adds, “When you think about it, it’s a good metaphor for the country in that it’s very large and situated on a very fertile plot of land that’s toiled on and worked on by so many people, but ultimately enjoyed and profited from by only a select few.” That, Manuel says, illustrates the class divide that has been so ingrained in the Philippines.
Manuel spoke with Variety about how the film relates to the colonial past of the country, and the metaphorical symbolism of the golf course. He also talks about reflecting that through Isabel’s gaze and why she represents an awakening.
The first image you see of Isabel is of her opening her eyes, and the last image you see of Clara is of her closing her eyes. For me, that’s very much representative of their narrative arcs. Isabel’s journey is one of awakening and remembering the past, seeing it and hearing it. Whereas Clara’s journey is one into slumber, inaction, passivity, and perpetuating the system. Clara is a tragic character. Isabel, on the other hand, is a heroic character because I feel like Isabel moves towards action, and Clara moves towards inaction.”
Clara is a non-actor, but Isabel was in the short. It was only her second time acting, and she was a very inexperienced actor. My directing style is to try to get out of the way as much as possible, so I spent a lot of time building the world of the character and of the film. When it comes to being on set, I try to direct them as little as possible because I trust all the work that we both did in pre-production. Freedom is such an important part of acting because every single decision and gesture that they make, they have to freely choose it. That’s how you get good acting. What I really look for in actors is playfulness because I see playfulness as a sort of resistance. What we try to do is build all these restrictions around them and then see how their playfulness and their autonomy express themselves through the parameters we’ve set.
It was very much a team effort. I’d also like to mention Vincent Villa. He’s a French sound designer based in Cambodia, and I feel like sound has a very important role to play in this film — even in the visual aesthetic — because sound guides the eye on where to look. I feel like the conversations we had were about developing an oral grammar that could give shape, texture, color, and sound to this invisible violence that we were very interested in exploring.
A lot of the conversations I had with Xenia were about my obsession with landscape photography and how it’s been used in different contexts as a colonial tool. Susan Sontag’s “On Photography” talks about how the American West was colonized through landscape photography. If you go through the Philippine archive of the turn of the 20th century — around the 1800s and 1900s — you’ll see that the Philippines was also colonized through photography.
Simon Schama writes about this in his book “Landscape and Power.” He talks about how landscape is a projection of man’s imagination onto rock, grass, and water. So the question naturally arises: Whose imagination is being projected? These colonial themes — this dreamwork of imperialism — very much inform the visual language of “Filipiñana.” You’re constantly seeing characters framed in these wide landscapes, and their small actions become a form of resistance to the colonizing gaze.
The slowness, for me, has a twofold purpose. First, it really helps communicate the heat and lethargy — the kind of lethargy that the Filipino humidity and the stifling 50-degree heat of a Filipino summer can induce. When you think about why the Philippines has stayed the same for so long — why the country has struggled with the same problems for so long — I think the heat has a part to play in that. If you’ve ever been in heat like that, so humid and sticky, you realize quite quickly that it’s like a quagmire. It makes action so hard to do because all you want to do is lie down. The slow pacing of the film was meant to communicate that. The second reason behind the deliberate pacing of the film was that I really wanted to capture this Filipino experience of waiting for change.
I feel like so much of what we’re trying to do is create a space for the viewer to exercise their autonomy—autonomy of sight, hearing and feeling. I say that because the way the drama is structured is very minimal. I feel like conventional narrative, in a way, is a form of gentrification. When you take into consideration how so many spaces — not just in the Philippines but around the world — are privatized, you realize you can step out of your house and, in five seconds, you’re being sold something by a billboard. Actually, you don’t even need to step out of your house; you can just go on Instagram. So, we really tried not to be didactic and instead create an autonomous space for viewers to practice their autonomy — or to be autonomous, if they choose to be. So when you ask me what I want them to take away, it’s hard to say because they can take away whatever it is they want to take away. The film’s designed like that.
I guess for me, one of the main things I’m interested in hearing from audiences after a screening is: How did they view the ending? Did they view it as an optimistic ending, or did they view it as a pessimistic one?