Sundance's "Filipiñana" Struggles in its Leap from Short to Feature

Although originally launched as the “U.S. Film Festival”,  Sundance has always held a special place for international films and filmmakers. Among this year’s lineup of international features was Filipiñana, a coming of age drama from the Phillipines that tells a poignant tale of culture and class with some unfortunately mixed execution.

Filipiñana, the story of Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), a Tee girl at a swanky Manilla golf course. After discovering that the president of the Golf Course, Dr. Palanca (Teory Guzman) is from the same ethnic minority as her, Isabel is forced to confront her place on the course, and in Filipino society at large.

Filipiñana is, as a film, first and foremost about class and racial divides in the Philippines. It is not subtle about this. Pine trees are spoken about in the same way as lower class workers (“if one wilts, we will dig it up and replace it” and “stay out of the sun, you don’t want to brown like those pine trees” stand out as particularly obvious). Although Dr. Palanca is from the same Ilokano ethnic group as Isabel, throughout the film, it becomes clear that he earned his place in society by selling out the Ilocanos, visually (and unsubtly) hinted at by his having Vitiligo, literally turning him from a brown man into a white one. 

While I’ll admit that I’m totally unqualified to address the specifics of the film’s commentary on Filipino society. As an American, I found the film’s take on my country of origin to be entirely baffling. Clarita, the Filipino-American heiress to her uncle’s golf supply empire, has several lines that seem to accentuate the supposed “meritocratic” nature of American Golf in specific, and American society at large. Clarita mentions that she had only visited a single, public course in America before returning to the Philippines, and that “In America, only professionals have caddies.” While her visit to a public course stands up to scrutiny (3/4ths of American golf courses are public), the assertion that “everyone carries their own bag” in America is a straight up falsehood. These statements, and how it is used to contrast American culture with that of the supposedly “elitist” Chinese tourists, seemed to be utter fiction to me as an American viewer. While I won’t claim to know much about how Chinese culture affects their style of tourism, the idea that Americans are some sort of self-reliant society where no one exploits the lower class for cheap labor is laughable, especially in a day and age where our government’s political malice is so out in the open. I expect the anti-Chinese messaging in Filipiñana to fall flat for much of the audience that it seems to be courting in the US. Sinophillia is has become cool with the artsy, globally conscious American youth in the last half decade and I imagine trying to flatter the main demographic of American foreign film viewers by praising the society with which they are so disillusioned will only come off as tone deaf. 

Ultimately, Filipiñana is a mixed bag. While the film is an absolute treat for the eyes and the commentary is likely be a hit for Filipino audiences, the pacing is glacially slow, with some shots lingering far beyond what I felt was necessary or comfortable. While this choice was likely made to highlight the monotony of underclass work contrasted with the beauty of the scenery, in practice, it totally kneecaps the pace of the film. For an hour and 40 minutes, Filipiñana feels almost an hour longer.

When the credits began to roll, several people walked out of the press screening, not knowing that the final shot of the film intended to continue for another 5 minutes. Despite the lack of cultural knowledge, the occasional switching of dialogue into Tagalog and Mandarin, and the less-than-subtle subtext, this film’s biggest problem is that watching through it felt like a chore. You can have all the insightful political messaging and unique commentary in the world, but if your audience gets bored halfway and drops out as soon as it feels convenient, what was the point? Ironically, Filipiñana started life as a short film, and a part of me thinks it would have been better if it stayed as one.