I met with Ron Morales, director of the new Filipino film ‘Graceland.’
We met at a Vietnamese restaurant on St. Marks called Pho 32 & Shabu. With Korean pop music in the background, we discussed the movie, acquired and now owned by Drafthouse Films.
Aside from the Filipino soap operas of my childhood, I had never seen a Filipino film that was entirely in Tagalog until now.
Graceland is also the first independent Filipino feature film to be picked up by the U.S. market, which is a big achievement and an exciting development, especially for the Filipino-American audience. In the Philippines, the reception for the film was really good much to Ron Morales’ surprise. Graceland came a long way from crowdsourced funding through Kickstarter, which allowed for donations to fund the film.
Graceland then went to a number of film festivals, including TriBeCa Film Festival and the San Diego Asian Film Festival where the film was just as well-received. The film was a rework of Ron Morales’ previous screenplay – he wrote it 5 years ago, submitted it to TriBeCa in April when he premiered it as one of the shortlist scripts. He was initially researching a different script in the Philippines, which did not pan out, and used that research and put it into Graceland.
He named it Graceland to portray the idea of ‘being fallen from grace.’
On the festival circuit, many aspiring independent filmmakers approached Morales for advice. and he suggested reading Save the Cat, a screenwriting book that is straight to the point.
“If you have a camera, just shoot a scene and play around with what you have at your disposal. As Filipino-Americans, we don’t really have many voices in arts and cinema that come to mind, but it’s a changing world,” Ron says. “Right now, Filipino cinema is getting more recognized in the international market.” He mention Brilliante Mendoza who won best director in Cannes a couple years ago.
“We’re starting to get out there,” Ron muses. The question now is, “How do we get the word out there?”
Audiences will be entertained by this thriller. The heaviness of these themes evoke a lot of empathy from the viewer. The issue of sex trafficking is the main premise of this film and it also tackles the notion of survival as well as the disparity between the working and upper classes.
The first image of a naked child in the film is a bit jarring, although the actress is of legal age. The actress looks as though she is in her pre-teens. At first glance, I thought, “How is this child pornography allowed in this film?” But as with most Filipina women, the actress looks much younger than she is in real life; she is 18.
We see that early on, Congressman Manuel Chango, played by Menggie Cobarrubias, the congressman in this film is guilty of sleeping with underage girls. There is an amazing montage that takes place in a brothel of sorts, wherein the main character, Marlon Villar, played by Arnold Reyes, is seen handing out envelopes of money to the underage girls, stating that “The money is from Congressman Chango.” Chango, meanwhile, sits in the room experiencing remorse for what he has done.
In Ron Morales’ words: “My understanding of the space in which the story unfolds was inspired strongly by a Tagalog cockfighting term: Wala. (Translated literally, wala means ‘have not’ or ‘none’ …essentially [pertaining to the idea of] an ‘underdog.’
“In the pervasive world of organized crime of the Philippines, the conventional division between good and bad, as it is commonly understood in Western society, seems to be replaced by a less philosophical but more practical division between the haves and have-nots. Those who ‘have’ also have the opportunity to make choices, even in a moral sense. Those who ‘have not’ are powerless against the whims of those who have.
“Graceland is a story about one underdog who decides he wants to take something for himself, and what happens to him as a result. The elements of poverty, organized crime and sexual exploitation are strongly portrayed in Graceland, presenting to the audience “the little known sad realities of an otherwise beautiful country.”
The corruption is palpable in this film, and yet we see the humanistic side to this corruption in the name of surviving the unthinkable.
Graceland opened in New York, Los Angeles and Austin on April 26, 2013, and is available on iTunes, on on-demand and for Download-to-Own.
