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A Spirit of Independence award-winning feature, shot with Panasonic
DV cameras, costing less than $7,000 open this weekend in the US. The
cameras were sold on eBay to finance post production. Cavite was filmed
guerrilla-style in the Philippine city of that name by Asian-American
co-directors Ian Gamazon and Neill Dela Llana. James MacGregor looks at
cross cultural filmmaking in the Philippines.
 The
Philippine-born American directing partnership had made films together
since their schooldays at San Diego's Montgomery High. They already had
three feature credits -Diego Stories (1996), The Book (1998) and
Freud's Second Law (2001) - to their name, but all were virtually
unseen, which is why the pair stuck to their day jobs; Dela Llana as a
civilian contractor for the US Navy in San Diego and Gamazon as a stock
manager for Banana Republic in LA.
Their filmmaking ambitions were kept alive in long telephone chats
until they hit upon the ultimate low budget movie with a small cast.
They would play themselves in a kidnap drama, with Gamazon as the
victim and Dela Llana as the friend who must save him, even in the face
of extreme demands from the kidnapper.
 With
little money Southern California or maybe Mexico were the obvious
locations, but then various terrorist acts that were happing involving
the Muslim minority in their birthplace and finally, the idea of
transferring the action to the Phillippines took hold.
Gamazon had left the Philippines when he was nine and had never been
back, but Dela Llana went back irregularly. On a 1999 visit his video
camera had captured everyday scenes of crowded city streets, "Jeepney"
taxis, markets and cockfights.
Those pictures screened to Gamazon clinched the location - it had to be the Philippines.
The decision to film in the Philippino city of Cavite was symbolic, but also practical.
Cavite was the place where the Philippines had formally declared their
independence from Spain and was a very attractive, vibrant location. On
the practical front,. Dela Llana's aunt lived there, which took care of
accommodation while shooting.
 The
result is described as a taught, virtual one-character drama, in which
Gamazon takes the role of Adam, a Filipino American security guard who
arrives in the Philippines for his father's funeral, only to discover
that Abu Sayyaf terrorists have kidnapped his mother and sister.
A taunting voice on a cell phone issues a series of demands that lead
him through market squares, squatter camps and shantytowns. As Adam
follows his caller's increasingly dangerous instructions, a desperate
struggle to save his family evolves into an exploration of identity as
he is forced to examine what it means to be a Filipino, an American and
a Muslim.
Two years of research went into the film, which to an extent is
autobiographical. For example the kidnapper always speaks the
Philippine language Tagalog when making his demands on the phone, but
Gamazon's character always responds to him in English. Dela Llana
explains that this is the way he and Gamazon respond in family
conversation with their parents on an every day basis.
The city of Cavite itself becomes another character in the story,
balancing the fact that almost all the narrative features Ian Gamazon,
for whom a return to the land of his birth after so many years away
proved to be a bit of a culture shock. Both partners had some
trepidation about filming in the city's rougher neighbourhoods when
filming finally got under way in October 2003, but they were made to
feel; very welcome by the people living there.
 As
a micro-crew, with Dela Llana on camera and Gamazon on sound with both
directing, they attracted little official attention, so were able to
film in a church where they later found filming was forbidden and were
able to wander around airports capturing scenes where film crews are
normally forbidden for security reasons.
In February this year their film gained an Independent Spirit Award and
they hope it might inspire other Asian-American filmmakers, though
mailboxes that have been crammed since wuinning their award would
suggest that it has.
Dela Llana has still kept his day job as a US Navy civilian contractor
going, but Gamazon has quit his job and is now working on developing
some script ideas with a couple of producers.
Their film Cavite opens this weekend in San Francisco.
Hillary Jones review - published in the Austin Chronicle:
"Screenwriter Larry Cohen may have recently cornered the stuck-on-the-phone-under-the-thumb-of-a-maniac market (Phone Booth, Cellular), but Cavite
ingeniously tweaks the genre by transposing the action to the
Philippines and by introducing a religious/political element.
Screenwriter and co-director Gamazon stars as Adam, a Filipino living
in San Diego who returns home to Cavite City to attend his father's
funeral. Cooling his heels at the airport, Adam receives a call
announcing that his mother and sister are being held captive. Receiving
his orders via cell phone, Adam must then traverse the city, carrying
out increasingly dangerous missions in order to secure his family's
release. Shot crisply on DV, Cavite tails Adam through squatter camps
and crowded markets, alleyways and cockfights, exploiting the
thoroughly Americanized Adam's feeling of ostracism from his homeland.
Despite its short running time, Cavite feels a little padded - the San
Diego-set portion of the story falls flat - but when the chase is on,
the film effectively conveys the tension and terror of Adam's plight."
Q&A: Guerilla Filmmaking at Its Finest: The Boys Behind Cavite
Why do you make movies?
Neill Dela Llana: We've been doing it since high school, and we
just caught the bug and it was something we wanted to get good at and
make a career out of it.
Why were you making movies in high school?
Dela Llana: It was for a Tagalog class. You know, you take
Spanish, French. Our high school had a Tagalog class and one of the
projects was to make a movie. We had a video camera and two VCR decks.
That's how we edited. (They laugh.) It was very archaic, but from there
we just kept doing it and doing it.
Ian Gamazon: From there, Robert Rodriguez's film "El Mariachi" came out and we thought, Oh man, we've got to do that!
Dela Llana: El Mariachi, Clerks, all those really low-budget films, we thought, if they can do it, we can do it.
Gamazon: Three films, and we still haven't done it. This is our
fourth feature film and we just couldn't get any attention. It was
rough.
So this is your El Mariachi then. Rodriguez probably edited some movies on the VCR that we never saw, too. (They laugh.)
Gamazon: But four feature films! Usually after the first feature, filmmakers give up. They're broke.
Dela Llana: They've mortgaged their homes. But we just kept at it.
What was the biggest motivating factor for telling this particular story: budget, plot, location, all of the above?
Dela Llana: It's kind of all of the above. It was perfect. It
was like we've got this plot, we can set it in the Philippines and it's
not gonna cost that much.
Gamazon: Because it's just one character and he's talking on a cell phone. Ideas we come up with, we think of budget first.
Do you have day jobs?
Dela Llana: I still do. I work for the Navy. I'm not in the Navy, but I'm a civilian contractor working for the Navy.
Gamazon: I used to work for Banana Republic. For years and years I was a manager, but recently I quit.
Dela Llana: To pursue the dream.
Gamazon: But I might end up there during the holidays. I'll be running out of funds.
Do you consider yourselves guerilla filmmakers?
Dela Llana: At this point, yeah.
How do you define guerilla filmmaking?
Dela Llana: No money, no permits, doing as many things on your film as possible on your own.
Am I right that the whole crew, from writing through editing, was just you two and one PA-slash-locations manager?
Dela Llana: Yeah.
Gamazon: No one trusted us anymore. This being our fourth film,
they're like we're not gonna help those guys out, they're not gonna pay
us. So we were like we're just doing it ourselves.
What was the budget for getting the film shot, edited and into the format that you sent out to festivals?
 Dela Llana: Two cameras, two plane tickets, that's pretty much it.
Gamazon: We bought the cameras and we sold them.
Dela Llana: To recycle the money. We took them to the
Philippines and when we got back we sold them on eBay to buy
post-production equipment.
Gamazon: It was something like $7000.
Dela Llana: We're not hurting as bad as we were after our three
previous films, which were all shot on 16mm. This was digital, so it
was super cheap.
So you don't have the cameras anymore?
Dela Llana: No, we don't, which totally sucks because I was totally in love with those things and we had two of them.
Gamazon: One was for insurance, just in case someone stole one in the Philippines.
Dela Llana: We didn't even use it. It just sat in our suitcase.
The guy on the phone tries to make Adam feel guilty for abandoning
his country. Is that something you wrestle with or are you happy to
have left all that behind?
Dela Llana (laughing): That's all over. We've got cable,
internet... (laughs some more). I feel it more when I go back to the
Philippines. In a way I feel like an outcast, even though I'm from the
Philippines. "He's from the U.S, he's Americanized." Here I'm like
everybody else. There are millions of other Filipinos running around,
but there I stand out.
Ian, do you consider yourself an actor?
Gamazon: No, that was out of necessity. Originally it was
supposed to be a female lead and we auditioned for a year and nobody
wanted to do it.
Dela Llana: For no pay, with two strangers in a Third World country.
Gamazon: It was a month before the actual shoot, we had our
cameras, what the hell do we do now, had our tickets, then he came up
with the actual idea, "You gotta do it."
Dela Llana: You gotta rewrite it for yourself. We gotta do this movie. So he rewrote it for himself.
Do you think you'll make more movies about the Philippines?
Dela Llana: We'd definitely like to go back and make more films
but we'd like to show different sides of the country that people
haven't seen.
How often do you visit?
Dela Llana: I try to go back every three to five years, but I
think we're going back this year because of the movie. I'm actually
kind of scared to show the movie. It's pretty wild there, no holds
barred. We could get shot.
Gamazon: We've gotten some of that already. Mostly positive, but
there are some old people who say why are you showing a bad side of the
Philippines? Why not show a beautiful side of the Philippines?
Tell them the next one will be a romantic comedy set on a beach,
about a beautiful Filipino girl who falls in love with an American
tourist. Maybe his cell phone winds up in her bag.
Dela Llana: All palm trees and coconuts.
Andrea Meyer's Q&A with Dela llana and Gamazon can be found on ifctv.com
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