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CROSS CULTURAL FILMMAKING - Guerrilla Movies in the Philippines

Cavite - shot guerilla-style in the Philippines for $7,000 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.

 

Ian Gamazon co-directs and takes the leading role as Adam in this Philippine kidnap drama CaviteThe 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. 

The crowded and colourful streets of Cavite City in the Philippines, provides an exotic backdrop to the dramatic narrativeWith 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. 

Micro-crew and guerilla-style shooting with a camcorder made easy work of tracking shots in busy city streets of CaviteThe 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. 

On Location - Asian-American co-directors Ian Gannon and Neill Dela Llana in Cavite City, the PhilippinesAs 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?

Co-directors Ian Gannon and Neill Dela Llana at Los Angeles film festivalDela 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