Dir. John Torres
2013, Philippines, 85 min
Tagalog with English subtitles
“Lukas, in the middle of the film, the actress will pay a visit. You’ll fall in love with her. And you’ll understand your father. I’ll become your memory. I haven’t shown you the middle yet.” Thus begins John Torres’s latest dream of a documentary, a highly experimental, gloriously free-form coming-of-age story. Shortly after the arrival of a film crew that throws his tiny, usually quiet village into a frenzy of commotion, Lukas’s father, Mang Basilio, announces that he is a tikbalang, the half-horse, half-man of Filipino folklore. When Mang Basilio disappears, the awkward, baffled Lukas sets out on a journey of self-discovery that will include a “river of forgetting,” invisible voices, and a hallucinatory blurring of reality and fantasy. Torres has already carved out an idiosyncratic niche for himself in the thriving world of documentary-fiction hybrids, and this is his most personal and expansive work to date.
Plays with We Still Have to Close Our Eyes
Dir. John Torres
2019, Philippines, 13 min
Tagalog with English subtitles
John Torres repurposes documentary footage captured from the sets of various Filipino productions (including the likes of Lav Diaz and Erik Matti) into an eerie, elliptical sci-fi narrative about human avatars controlled by apps.
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