Cleaners + The Gossips of Cicadidae [In-Person Only]
This event took place Nov 1 - Nov 8, 2023
$14 General Admission
$10 Student/Child/Senior
$7 NWFF Member
⚠️ Content warning ⚠️
This film contains a non-lethal scene of self-mutilation.
Glenn Barit
Philippines
2019
1h 18m
About
(Glenn Barit, Philippines, 2019, 78 min, in Filipino/Tagalog with English subtitles)
Coming-of-age film about high school classroom-cleaners for the school year 2007-2008. Set in the backdrop of a Catholic school in Tuguegarao City, the characters deal with different pressures of being proper, pure, and popular, while slowly discovering that the world is dirty and superficial to begin with.
Screens with Vahn Pascual's short film "The Gossips of Cicadidae (Alingasngas ng mga Kuliglig)"
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).
Click for Accessibility Info
Ticketing, concessions, cinemas, restrooms, and our public edit lab are located on Northwest Film Forum’s ground floor, which is wheelchair accessible. All doors in Northwest Film Forum are non-motorized, and may require staff assistance to open. Our upstairs workshop room is not wheelchair accessible.
The majority of seats in our main cinema are 21″ wide from armrest to armrest; some seats are 19″ wide. We are working on creating the option of removable armrests!
We have a limited number of assistive listening devices available for programs hosted in our larger theater, Cinema 1. These devices are maintained by the Technical Director, and can be requested at the ticketing and concessions counter. Also available at the front desk is a Sensory Kit you can borrow, which includes a Communication Card, noise-reducing headphones, and fidget toys.
The Forum does NOT have assistive devices for the visually impaired, and is not (yet) a scent-free venue. Our commitment to increasing access for our audiences is ongoing, and we welcome all public input on the subject!
If you have additional specific questions about accessibility at our venue, please contact our Patron Services Manager at maria@nwfilmforum.org. Our phone number (206-329-2629) is voicemail-only, but we check it often.
Made possible due to a grant from Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, in partnership with Sensory Access, our Sensory Access document presents a visual and descriptive walk-through of the NWFF space. View it in advance of attending an in-person event at bit.ly/nwffsocialnarrativepdf, in order to prepare yourself for the experience.
⚠️ COVID-19 Policies ⚠️
NWFF patrons will be required to wear masks that cover both nose and mouth while in the building. Disposable masks are available at the door for those who need them. We are not currently checking vaccination cards. Recent variants of COVID-19 readily infect and spread between individuals regardless of vaccination status.
Read more about NWFF’s policies regarding cleaning, masks, and capacity limitations here.
How does this film look so cool??
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.
About this program:
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).