Condensed
from:
Festival
Report: QCinema International Film Festival 2016 (Part 2)
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Source:
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Kristian Cordero’s
Hinulid stars Nora Aunor as a woman bringing the ashes of her recently murdered
son back to a small village in Bicol where truth and myth seem inseparable.
Throughout her long train ride through the darkness, past and present mix
freely, her memories breaking through the shroud of her present reality as she
tries to come to grips with the pain that she’s feeling.
The film
immediately establishes a very poetic tone. The opening scenes introduce motifs
that will run through the entire movie. There’s clearly been a lot of thought
put into all of this, but the end product is kind of a real slog. My good will
for this film ran out about forty-five minutes in. At that point, it felt like
the film was just throwing in one abstraction after the next, putting way too
much stock in the power of its symbols. One can’t fault the film for its
ambition. The scope of what it’s trying to cover is certainly admirable; the
story touching on grand themes that study the intersection between faith and
myth and culture and the ways that all three can be suppressed. But the back
half of this film just becomes exhausting, offering so little to hold on to.
And the thing is, the film is really good in its simplest scenes. The most
affecting scene, for my money, is a very low-key sequence where the main
character is playing a game of shooting stars by herself, her son no longer
there to play with her. That one scene speaks more eloquently about the emotion
of this story than the rest of the film.
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