Interior of The Forum theatre for the screening of Filipiñana, in the picture it displays an ad for Asahi (Source: own photograph)

Day Two and Three (09, 12/08/2026)

[Track 6: Life During Wartime (Live) by Talking Heads]

The morning started off later than last time but still on time to get to Malvern and then a quick ride on the tram to the Astor Theatre. My sister and I were out to catch Los Javis’ (Javier Ambrossi and Calvo) La Bola Negra, or as my sister dubbed it: “sad Spanish war gays”. Despite the fact that it really only just makes a third of the film.

A film as epic as La Bola Negra is difficult to fully discuss. Inevitable will be the question of how you approach the film’s subject matter which is as emotionally heartaching as it is meandering, and whether that may be pleasant or worthy of praise to you is ambiguous. Personally I think it is one of my favourites of the year. It is so greatly intermedial so as to become almost its own thing entirely, a unique tour de force which has crafted a distinct cinematic language. At times prosaic, brief yet poetic moments, questionably musical at others, and all surrounding the text of an unpublished play and slightly supposing and thereby completing what was lost. It serves as a poignant symbol of queer history and how it remains almost all too often buried, assumed to be lost. The titular “bola negra” serves much of the same signaling towards society’s rejection and oppression as does the pink paint, a pointer towards the pink triangles. La Bola Negra becomes the slightly aspirational, parallel goal towards dignity.

Perhaps also structurally it works for me because of this balance between an understated thesis and visual and narrative experimentation. Longing and yearning as usual, but having reread Homage to Catalonia, it seems all the more tragic.

With a big break in the day, my sister and I decided to have an early dinner at a different Brunetti, this time on Flinders Lane. For me an Amatriciana, she ordered a Margherita and a seafood risotto. I also got a Campari Spritz. Some more waiting, some conversation and a few blocks over to ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image) for a sort of nighttime screening of this year’s instalment(s) of Hong Sang-soo in The Day She Returns. Thankfully I had rewatched Right Now, Wrong Then the night before and was in the headspace for Hong’s minimalism. My sister with a ruinous sleep schedule and worse attention span was not.

[Track 7: I Don’t Know Why by 호아 HOA]

Hong’s character study serves as an incredibly insightful look into the human psyche upon various yet distinctly significant dimensions. Private lives, pleasures and feelings, legacies and performance for society. Song Seon-mi plays an actor who has returned from a 12-year hiatus to be in an arthouse film. She takes three different interviews with younger female journalists, who possess various levels of inquisitiveness and engagement yet all leave their notebooks empty and phone storages filled with recording. Dialogues of interview responses are practised, almost forgotten in feeling by the very end. Hong’s opting in for a black-and-white photography, which I swear degrades with every chapter and location to the film, is almost like a visual indicator for how tired the actress, and in fact us through any day, gets tired and sometimes just done with keeping up the act. What remains true? What remains authentic? It is never set in stone. But Hong’s screenplay, carried forth greatly here for me by subtitle translator Darcy Paquet, a titan for contemporary Korean cinema and its bridge to the international, says that it might be a good thing as much as it is an elusive one. It means that the quest is never over to discover ourselves and be better.

[Track 8: (Ang) Bayan Ko by Freddie Aguilar]

This time round, I almost knocked down my sister’s door because I still did not know my way around the suburbs nor the city, and my stingy self did not want to spend precious money on an eSIM for my brief stay in Australia (no apologies to Optus or Yes or any other provider). Unfortunately my sister was busy during the runtime of the film while the aforementioned cousin has suddenly become ill the morning of. My sister later found a friend who could take the ticket but he arrived a little late. Though did he miss much?

Filipiñana is a triumphant debut feature from Rafael Manuel and I would argue that it stands as an incredibly well-encapsulating, urgent work; a representative candidate for a national cinema which has never veered away from its imperialist, capitalist and patriarchal megastructure it suffers under. While black dramedies are never easy, and unlikely to truly win even a majority of peoples’ love, the film at least can celebrate a victory of cinematic distinction. It produces a symmetry and composition which makes it more disturbing to the distant, hyper-composed cinematography approach that Greenaway did relative to Parajanov and Wes Anderson. In some ways it almost becomes more disturbing than Greenaway’s work by ultimately keeping repressed until the deep end. 

Southeast Asia has found itself another noteworthy filmmaker, with a potential in becoming an auteur, through its depiction of an increasingly inhuman golf course. Labour has become more and more devalued, bodies become as usable an object as golf clubs and lives are replaceable like a wilted pine. A very poignant tale of late-stage capitalism upon the Global South with most pressing a situation as the Philippines’ continuous historical struggle.

My sister’s friend, Val, an Indonesian, also pointed out how the situation is no less desperate in Indonesia as well. Questions of national development which begin to feel almost impossible to face head on. Cycles of drainage which show why Southeast Asian diaspora and immigrants seem to exhibit a strange binary in dispositions. Either a desperate, near greedy rush towards money to shield them away from such degradation; or a much more righteous yet later cynical and tired drive to try and fix it, to be moral and compassionate. Will each of us come out intact or even alive? No. But I certainly hope, as I did last minute scrolling through some records at a nice little shop that day before returning home for a last minute packing for the flight, that we shall come out remembering why it was worth it.

Epilogue

[Track 9: De Manhã – Ao Vivo by Percy Ribeiro (original by Maria Bethânia is good as well)]

The hope in that record store was the excitement of seeing an LP: 100 Anos De Música Popular Brasileira Vol: 6. The beauty of that genre and the encapsulation of a nation’s musical soul and maybe even more. Against imperialism’s impoverishment, dictatorship’s degradation and uncertainty’s urges. Of course cinema did last over a century. But not everyone’s. And when tasked with the question, the ordeal, of loss one can concede it, find it again, make something anew to fill that void or perhaps realise the void was never one in the first place. That you lost nothing. For the sake of sanity let us suppose that finding it or marking a new path are what we want, because they are easier. The annual festival run has given me another chance to start glimpsing into cinema’s future and most importantly to truly underline that “international” aspect. For cinema as an artform cannot be so unless it is of human heritage, and that means all of us. MIFF in some ways is not some ultimate last word in diversity in cinema, despite Melbourne’s slight esteem in being a rather international city. But with its nice programming upon a still large sea-blue brochure as well as its oddities and its venues, it is still one worthy of consideration.