MANILA SKIES DATE: SATURDAY, MAY 1 TIME: 7:30 PM VENUE: DGA 2 BUY TICKETS

MANILA SKIES (Himpapawid)
(Philippines, 2009) Dir./Scr.: Raymond Red
Video, 110 min., color, narrative, in Tagalog w/ E.S.

In a rural province, a poor farmer finds a bag of money and jewelry. He pays off some debt and vows to send his young son away to the city to find a better life. He commands the boy never to return home. And, in one dramatic cut, from the boy carrying woven baskets on his shoulder to the boy as a man lifting large parcels at a Manila loading dock, we begin Raymond Red’s deceptively simple and affecting parable.

Ten years after winning the first Palme D’Or awarded to a Filipino for his sublime short film ANINO, and after refining his technical chops on big budget commercials, Raymond Red returns with MANILA SKIES, an allegorical tale of the slow deterioration of a man’s spirit when faced with insurmountable adversities. It follows Raul, a soon-to-be unemployed dock worker desperately trying to land an overseas job and hoping to make enough money to return home to his ailing father. Raul’s earnest attempts become mired in Kafkaesque bureaucracy and pure rotten luck. Much of the blame however rests on his volatile and erratic behavior. He is a percolating brew of misfortune and busted idealism. His inevitable breakdown leads to his involvement with a gang of amateur thieves and eventually a collapse that brings him to carry out a far-fetched attempt at hijacking an airplane in order to get back home to his father.

It’s perhaps a modest linear plot, but in Red’s hands, MANILA SKIES reaches heights uncommon in many films. A subtle twist here and a play with expectations there, and suddenly a whole world opens up revealing a radical and dramatic film heavy with consequences and colored with nuances. Vividly shot with, funnily enough, the über-high definition RED camera, Red photographs the city in a palette of subdued browns, greens, yellows and grays. Raul merely blends in with the faded and stained walls of his apartment, the deteriorating concrete buildings, and the cluttered cityscape. Raul is an everyman, pushed to the brink. In the film, he is a vessel for the frustrations of the impoverished in the Philippines (80% of the population are poor, as a reporter claims in the film). MANILA SKIES depicts his hopes crumbling as his own morals disintegrate along with it. In a country where a majority of its population is of Raul’s circumstance, the film poses a sobering and dire calamity.
— Joel Quizon

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COMMUNITY CO-PRESENTERS: FilAm ARTS, Inc.; Search to Involve Pilipino Americans, Inc.