Faraway My Shadow Wandered is a hybrid documentary combining elements of dance and docu-fiction that coalesce to form an enigmatic exploration of one’s family history. The film follows Junya, who returns to his childhood hometown, coming to terms with a failed promise he made to take over his grandfather’s Shinto shrine. Co-directed by Liao Jiekai and Sudhee Liao, the film was initially conceived during the interdisciplinary Cinemovement residency, where one filmmaker collaborates with one dance artist to research, conceptualise, and ultimately produce a dance film. This is their second collaboration after working together on The Mist, a short film that received the best director prize in the 27th SGIFF.

Set in the coastal town of Animizu, a region on the Noto Peninsula of Japan, the film opens with an almost wordless prologue featuring a female dancer in a windbreaker contorting with trembling hands inside a cave as the swelling tide rises. The person is Sara (a Singaporean dancer based internationally), who is researching material for her new dance piece. A male figure in the shadow descends the rocky stairs into the cave as if observing her solitary performance from the shadows. It turns out to be an elliptical cut revealing Junya (with a film camera in hand) approaching the same space the dancer was in. His slow and stoic demeanour contrasts with the dancer as he stands in a half-bow position, reciting a prayer to the Gods to be purified as the waves come crashing. The film then jumps spatially and temporally to the interior of a Shrine. Junya, donning an elaborate traditional attire performs a religious ritual before the film cuts to the title card (a poignant vignette suggesting what it could have been if he fulfilled his grandfather’s wish). 

As the film begins proper after the title intro, we approach Junya’s personal story through the gaze of Sara. In their first meeting at an Izakaya, we find out that they coincidentally share the same birthday, further drawing similarities and parallels between the two. And also inciting her to travel with Junya back to his childhood home. The film sets up two distinct modes of being—Sara experiencing life in the present through her dance while Junya’s present is filtered through recollections of past regrets. His detachment from the present is symbolised by his frequent use of the camera to capture locations of his childhood. 

In the fairly long car scenes with Junya, the static camera remains on him as he recounts his childhood while occasionally stopping the car to take photographs of the places of his past using a film camera. The film presents these locations in the form of photographs instead of cutaways of the actual locations. These static and murky film stills suggest Junya’s experience of the present is irrevocably tied to the past. Junya’s narration of his internal conflict about not fulfilling his grandfather’s wishes does at times feel inert. As a viewer, it can be quite hard to relate without much knowledge of his family's religious tradition and why it is so important to him.

Although the driving scenes with Junya is a formally inventive approach in showing how he views the present, the over-reliance on exposition does become repetitive without revealing any deeper insight and eventually bogs down the narrative drive of the film (no pun intended). In retrospect, I wished there was some form of interaction between Junya and Sara during the car scenes, which would probably have revealed more about themselves. 

Sara throughout the film seems to be relegated to being a cipher, antithetical to his mode of experience. She is presented without a past, existing as a metaphorical shadow and is even dressed in black in contrast to Junya’s white sweater. Junya, back in his hometown, wanders through the Shrine and then to his abandoned childhood home. The camera drifts through the gloomy space, adopting his pov and eventually fixes its gaze on Sara, her body moving with balletic finesse as if she is in a trance.

The dance sequences are raw and almost improvisatory, with Sara fully immersed in the present moment as the camera becomes transfixed on her, capturing every fluid and sudden convulsive movements. The handheld nature of capturing the dancer makes it feel spontaneous and fleeting, inviting viewers to be in the moment. The mystifying sequence could be seen as a surreal one as if Junya is watching Sara embodying his psyche, confronting his past.

The stark contrast between the scenes centring mainly on Junya in the car and Sara respectively brings forth the film’s formal tension between film and dance. It exemplifies that film is still primarily a visual medium that oscillates between movement and stasis over the reliance on narration and exposition. This tension allows the dance pieces to shine, being visceral and enthralling in the process of portraying intangible human complexities, as compared to film’s tendency to fall back on exposition to pine for the viewer’s empathy for its characters. 

What makes up for the film’s lack of narrative drive is the film’s atmospheric setting within the harsh winter locations and dance sequences captured evocatively through its cinematography. Notably, there is an impressive long take near the end of the film, seeing Sara in a wide shot as if wrestling against the rising tides and wind on a rocky coast as Junya watches on. These moments and the malaise the characters feel immerse us in the forbidding landscapes and the feeling of being alienated in one’s childhood hometown. Faraway My Shadow Wandered is meandering and unfocused at times, but never tedious in its meditative reckoning with one’s tenebrous past.   

Faraway My Shadow Wandered was previously screened at the 31st Singapore International Film Festival last year. It will be screened at the IFFR (International Film Festival Rotterdam) 2021 June Programme. You can watch the trailer here.

At first glance, People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose seems to operate on a fairly straightforward premise: it is a documentary that covers the arduous filming process of an unfinished movie that starred Liz Alindogan — a rising star of 1980s Philippine cinema. Yet, as the film unfolds, the narrative becomes increasingly difficult to follow or make sense of, and by the film's end, one might feel at a loss for what has just unfolded. To decipher the perplexing nature of People Power Bombshell, however, one must go beyond the film's narratological content. Only then can one realise the art behind the camera: at its core, People Power Bombshell is an experimental, meta-cinematic film that intentionally seeks to deconstruct the filmic medium.

According to the director, John Torres, the unfinished film was found in the form of 35mm film rolls under Alindogan’s bed. The unfinished film was shot by acclaimed director Celso Ad Castillo, but Castillo and his team struggled to shoot — and complete — the film in its entirety. Torres combined the found footage of the unfinished film with new footage he shot to create People Power Bombshell. As the original film footage had no audio tracks, Torres and his team interviewed (most of) the original cast to expound on the entire filming ordeal, as well as provide improvised voice-overs for scenes from the found footage. The result, as captured in People Power Bombshell, is a rather confusing narrative: diegetically, the film seems to be about a bunch of Filipino actors who act as Vietnamese individuals for a movie. Thus, in this sense, People Power Bombshell is about a movie within a movie. Two male characters fall in love with Liz Alindogan, and there is a violent confrontation between them later on. Yet, these ‘fictional truths’ are predominantly inferred from fragmentary moments within the movie, and such moments require tremendous effort on the part of the viewer to comprehend everything that is going on.

Indeed, People Power Bombshell proves rather challenging when we confront the film with our conventional expectations of cinematic narrative. We see the old footage of Castillo’s original project interspersed with new footage, with the changes slowly progressing from smooth transitions to a somewhat disruptive manner. The visible decay of the original footage is aestheticized; the fading, fuzzy and damaged images come off as an intentional visual effect of sorts. Furthermore, People Power Bombshell is replete with grainy, restored images, confusing voiceover dialogues that do not match the characters’ genders at times, and what seems like a non-linear story arc that constantly travels between Alindogan and Castillo’s time to our contemporaneous era. 

Yet, the puzzling narrative that People Power Bombshell presents can be understood as a method of challenging, and negating, the conventional concepts of a stable, linear filmic narrative. By doing so, the film effectively highlights the illusory nature behind the creation process of any given movie. The integration of ostensibly random and incongruous sequences can be understood as a postmodernist move by Torres, employed to pay homage to the lost histories of Filipino cinema, all while self-reflexively highlighting the sense of artificiality that is involved in stitching together and creating a movie.

Another source of bewilderment is the (de)construction of both historical truths and fictional truths in the film. The film offers multiple glimpses into many historical moments, but never truly settles down on any. These moments include: Celso Ad Castillo’s legacy, as embodied in the unfinished film; the could-haves of Liz Alindogan, a rising Filipino actress in the 1980s; and the revolutionary socio-cultural context of 1980s Philippines. In a sense, film demonstrates both a refusal to formally rewrite history and a refusal to portray such a history accurately. Instead, People Power Bombshell mixes fact and fiction to produce a world that is always in flux and never truly settled in history. It is a film that looks to the future of the found footage, while simultaneously glaring back at the forgotten pasts of the Castillo's original intention and vision for his film. Through this, the film once again denies any straightforward interpretation of its content, thus negating the idea of a cohesive, linear storyline as articulated through the cinematic device. Thus, People Power Bombshell is neither a formal documentary nor a work of narrative fiction. Instead, the film sits on the interstitial space between the two genres: a baffling experimental film is neither truly fiction nor non-fiction.

People Power Bombshell is not an easy watch, as it often leaves the viewer with many clues and very few answers as to what they are watching. One might be even inclined to call it a form of avant garde cinema in terms of its ambition and technique, and vouch that the film would belong in an art exhibit more so than at a cinema screening. Yet, this is precisely what makes People Power Bombshell so unique: it is a meta-cinematic achievement that revolves around the making, and unmaking, of a complex film situated in a politically complex time. The film constantly reminds us of the film’s own materiality and artifice in constructing its own (fictional) truths. Through stretching the idea of the unreliable narrator to its limits, People Power Bombshell highlights the cinematic remediation of both fictional and real histories into the narrative that is presented to us. It is through understanding this remediation that we can invoke the ghosts of an almost forgotten past in Filipino cinematic history.