Forced by his father to become the next albularyo (healer) of their town, a boy secretly despises his conventional boring life until he falls in love with a Tikbalang (an elemental beast).

Cleaners was shot, edited, printed out on copy paper, highlighted, then re-scanned. It was a herculean feat by a young, dedicated team.

“You can imagine the painstaking effort it takes to print an entire film’s frames. Cleaners has eight frames per second and runs more than 60 minutes. The film has more than 43,000 frames. This means that Barit and his team have to print and photocopy 43,000 frames, then color these by hand using highlighters.”

“For this film’s printed frames, Barit wanted to achieve the kind of grittiness and coarseness you get from an old photocopier. The post-production team even sought the ugliest copier it could find. “Since this is also a period film, we preferred an old, clanky photocopier because it will be more faithful to the actual texture of photocopied materials of that time,” Barit said.”

Read all about it in Esquire Philippines! And here’s a BTS video of the highlighting team.

Paglipas ng Gunaw (When the Apocalypse is Over): New Philippine Cinema

These digital, radically color-graded, and often square or even rectangularly framed alternate dimensions offer new ways of seeing Philippine myths, pasts, presents, and futures. The multidisciplinary roots of the foundational First (’50s–’60s) and Second (’70s–’80s) golden ages of Philippine filmmakers—comedians, lawyers, doctors, therapists, pianists, psychic trainers, shamanists—persist today in the graphic designers, animators, colorists, VFX artists, singers, DJs, and event planners who comprise the new voices behind these features and shorts. But the bombastic styles of these active young filmmakers differ dramatically from their classically trained or genre-ingrained progenitors. Without leaving history behind, these films shed all influences that do not serve them. With a form that is heavily motivated by VFX and a concerted focus on post-production (processes which the directors are often heavily involved or carry out on their own), unlikely aspect ratios, et cetera, the body of work looks and moves in a way that actually feels new.

Many of these stories imagine absurd, alienating worlds and lonely characters who long for something or someone outside the limits of the frame.

Programmed by Aaron Hunt. Also playing at NWFF: Fisting + Bold Eagle (Dec. 6–10).