Review: HINULID

By: Ronz Maceda

“Hinulid” is a visceral-cerebral-visual trifecta. Framed by ruminations on faith, science, lore and politics, it bleeds with a rare parental love that is more formidable than life and death combined.

(The film made me contemplate, smile, cry…and cry again.)

Kristian Cordero, only on his second outing as a filmmaker, deftly utilizes the poetic time mode to breathe pathos and philosophies into his complex, non-linear storytelling: a eulogy on a mother and child’s unbreakable bond that intersects a deconstruction of an old Bikol legend as a socio-political commentary. Or vice versa?

(As part-Bicolano myself--my late beloved father hailed from Daraga--I encourage Mr. Cordero to further his cinematic exploration of Bikol myths, local color and latter-day realities.)

Nora Aunor exhibits pain-- her rawest and most real to date--that is multiplied three times or more. And that sturdiest love of all, eloquently communicated by her facial and body language, is magnified many fold. Hearing the artist speak in her native Rinconada is akin to hearing her crooning live.

Commendable is Jess Mendoza for his affecting yet still unaffected performance. Memorable, too, are the Bicol-based actors: the old priest, the blind caretaker, the two young Lucases and the school administrator.

Clocking more than 150 minutes, “Hinulid” is rife with phantasmagoria, repetitive and hard to fathom at some point. Perhaps, it can stand some editing; add some trimming of the fat in the screenplay, without minimizing its scope and impact. Meanwhile, the music, special effects and cinematography are done well.

Some may quibble that “Hinulid” is a film that does not want or know how to end. But they ought to ask themselves: does a mother’s love and grief for her child, living or dead, ever end?

(PS. They say that "Hinulid" is a homecoming project for La Aunor. To our literati and film-literate Noranian kabsat overseas like Wilfredo, Mykeo and Jojo, this film is a homecoming for all of you as well.)

QCinema 2016: HINULID

By:  John Tawasil

Present Confusion

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Source:

http://devasishanti.blogspot.com/2016/10/qcinema-2016-hinulid-women-of-weeping.html

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There's a certain kind of lyricality in the interconnected scenes of Kristian Cordero's Hinulid; with its non-linear, almost abstract narrative, the work feels more like a poem than a film. Collectively, its themes limn a cinematic pieta, a mother searching her memories for the meaning behind her son's seemingly meaningless death. These memories are interspersed with religious iconography, treatises on law, justice, and flashbacks. The film ends up loosely constructed as a result.

Nora Aunor's star shines among her fellow actors, giving us a spectrum of emotions, at times impenetrable, at times vulnerable. It's always a treat to see her in action, although without an equally formidable foil her co-actors pale in comparison.

While the film's poetry holds for most of the running time, the work starts to crumble under its own weight during the last half hour, as it tries to tackle too many things. During this period we see several scenes where the film could have ended perfectly, but didn't. The end result proves exhausting as the film tries to include as much as it can into an already full package.

Despite that, the film's poetry cannot be denied, and certain scenes prove mesmerizing. Parts of Hinulid can be quite challenging, but the rewards may be worth it in the end.

HINULID

Condensed from:

Festival Report: QCinema International Film Festival 2016 (Part 2)

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Source:

http://www.clickthecity.com/movies/a/31106/festival-report-qcinema-international-film-festival-2016-part-2

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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.

"INSTANT NOTES" on Kristian Sendon Cordero's 'HINULID'

By: MARNE KILATES

I JUST CAME from the Gala Screening of Kristian Sendon Cordero’s “Hinulid.” I must put down a few notes before I turn in for the night.

There is a pleasant irony in watching one of the saddest, most elegiac movie I’ve seen in years, and starring the reigning drama queen of Philippine cinema, Nora Aunor, and yet nowhere in the almost three-hour "magical drama" does she shed a tear. It is probably the director’s conceit, or the actor’s challenge to herself, or both.

Not in any negative manner, after the movie I felt like I was coming from a wake and I half-desired to perform the post-wake practice (perhaps superstitious) of “pagpag.” But perhaps it was a wake. An ambivalent lament for lost values whose opposites were expressed by people in the “wake” of the main character, Lucas, and their distorted sense of what’s important in terms of recalling the virtues of the dead. “He was a lady’s man,” said the militia leader. In an earlier scene (in the movie’s flash-back, flash-forward narrative), the academic was enumerating the grieving “favors” from the dead’s alma mater—mass cards, corporal acts of mercy, requiem masses by the school’s priest-officials, etc., like accumulated indulgences. Then there are the frat men.

It was a poet’s movie, not only with liberal quotations from the director’s favorite poets (Hopkins and Rilke, and later the director’s own lines), but in the visual execution and the use of visual symbols to move the narrative, and the simultaneity of the time element (the past, the present, and the future crisscrossing all throughout), among others.

The poet-director is firstly a poet who is comfortable in the visual medium, conversant with movie techniques and adding some of his own. Thus thoroughly contemporary. And it will take lots of courage, actually, to somehow impose the imaginative or imaging “quirks” of the poet on the more than partially commercial nature of cinema. Fortunately, it won initial funding in a festival (QCinema International Film Festival), but had to crowd-fund itself later as it may have underestimated its “realization cost.” As I told the director half-jokingly as the crowd milled around after the screening, it was a poem more than a movie.

Perhaps there is a new or emerging tradition in either the national cinema or the Bikol portion of it—as I’ve seen some samples from Director Alvin Yapan and the previous work I’ve seen form Cordero, and what Vic Nierva’s (Victor Dennis Tino Nierva) new short film is promising. Are our newer films becoming more “literary,” or perhaps is there a new “thinking cinema”? Or is it only the Bikol portion that might be even straying from current tendencies towards “poverty porn” or the unremitting urban noire? Or is “regional” cinema less constrained and thus more free to weave in the already extant “magical realism” that lurks in the provincial hinterland?

The film’s theme line is “Memory is stronger than justice.” Because memory is the only human weapon against unjust death and death by injustice. Perhaps it is the only human weapon. It may also be said that to remember is human, to be just divine.

Enthusiastic applause at the end, not at all hesitant or tentative, indicated that even if there were some hints of a longueur in some segments, these were probably ignored by the instantaneous tribute. 'Hinulid' (incidentally, the word means “laid to rest” or “laid on a bed and tucked in,” like an infant fast asleep; but which also refers to the dead Christ enshrined in one of the barrios near Naga City) is opulent in substance and form.

It might be funereal and elegiac, esp. in its use of poetry and the traditional and chanted 'pasyon', but at the same time it probes the sources of our grief and interrogates the causes of our somnambulant peace. Kristian Sendon Cordero, the poet I know, continues to show his deft and confident hand in the complex genre of filmic poetry or poetic cinema he has chosen.

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Source:

https://web.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10209481002438704&set=a.1071048853193.53651.1135282292&type=3&theater

Initial Thoughts on "HINULID"

By: Christian Dy

Padre de la Rama, the sagely priest Raffi Banzuela plays in the film, says something about men being caught between remembering the past and imagining the future. Memory then is behind us, and imagination, in front of us.

I am tempted to play around with the idea, and to think that the ideal state of affairs would be the reverse; that imagination were behind us, and memory were in our future. Would it not be the most Christ-like of conditions if men were imagined (and thus anticipated) before being conceived, and then remembered after their time had come to pass? Perhaps, but this most ideal of conditions is not given to everyone.

Indeed, there are even those whose births are accidents of circumstance, and whose lives and deaths have been long forgotten.

This is worse than suffering injustice in life. Hinulid, then, delivers excellently when it asserts the converse: that memory is greater than justice. Indeed mortal justice could not do final justice to broken bones and wounded flesh and emptied spirit. The laws of mere men are meaningless in the face of eternity. Christ asked not to be avenged, but to be remembered, and his Church finds sustenance in that final instruction. The repentant thief asked for nothing more than to be remembered when the Lord ascends to paradise. All hope in our faith, all meaning to our existence, and our only chance at cheating on our appointment with oblivion is the prospect of being remembered. It subverts all the pain.

Death is no incident if it does not offer passage into memory. We owe it to our beloved dead to remember them.

They say that the sense of hearing fades away last when one nears death. If anything, this reveals the intimate relationship between sound and memory. Without devaluing its visual quality, Hinulid is primarily an aural experience. The film's sounds evoke, invoke, and provoke.

Finally, I have debated with myself whether to include a brief note on what I saw to be artistic influences of the director pervading the film. The literary quality of the film is palpable; Cordero's opus would make an excellent tribute to Borges. It is also, certainly, a tip of the hat to Jesuits, under whom the director studied, and to pedagogy in general. Most pleasingly to this convert of a writer, Hinulid is highly reverential of the Church, without worshiping it. This is a breath of fresh air from the stale atmosphere of contemporary independent cinema, where speaking ill of ancient institutions seems to be the norm if not the prerequisite.

In summary, Cordero has extended the boundaries of cinema, without having to say so. In the Bikolano risorgimento, Cordero is often called the enfant terrible. The reverence, the humility, the genius in the film make me think that he merits the additional (if not alternative) title of "enfant adorable." Hinulid is a Bikolano film first; but it is Bikol with a loving view to the world.

Critique of HINULID

By: Jason Pilapil Jacobo

Part I

There is a scene in Kristian Sendon Cordero’s sophomore film “Hinulid” that emblematizes the predicament of mourning that the narrative seeks to work through in its iterations of how forlorn the human can be when abandoned permanently through that event: death. It is dusk in Iriga. Sita Dimaiwat (Nora Aunor) traverses the cemetery arch on which the Latin phrase “Via Omni Caris” is painted; the bodiless cannot trespass. Sepulchres are built not to hold the remains of the departed; the funerarium is such a place, because we are all alone, we fear ourselves also fading. Do not leave me just yet; here, a monument. Through a labyrinth of tombs fortified by cement and marble, Aunor blends in with the shades of a tropic crepuscule: ochre, as the waning sun; obsidian, like the cloak of night. When she finds her son Lucas (Jesus Mendoza) weeping before the tomb of his priest-guardian (Raffi Banzuela), she participates in a frame of grief: she sees the one she has yet to mourn for, mourning. That the rhythms of sorrow commingle in this instance points to the opportunity where the film locates the time where one is entitled to grieve---memory, that interregnum in the mind where one labors too hard to come to terms with passage: what has gone is not only lost; it is foregone to be found as missing. Even when the injury is not total, the site of ruin tells us: here lies all the hurt, every inch speaks of an insufferable damage. So, one asks: Did it happen? Was he here? Were all of it true? The act of yearning is that moment of provenance.

Part II

Cordero is most anxious to pursue this cusp of thought that he conjures the testimony through a mode of retrieval that reduces the quadrant of interpretive possibilities someone like Dante Alighieri has offered to a mere if not a modest proposal. The mourning is grounded in a cosmogonic myth of how galactic light is split into maternal brilliance and cherubic luminosity and how the earth registers this scission upon a meteorite isle where fireflies surrender their final blaze. This autochthonous basis is inlaid with a colonial narrative of christological interment: the Messiah is dead, yes, but thrice, as a statuary of identical eburnean figures clothed in vermilion radiance and encased in cuboid glass. The triplication is a mnemonic to refuse the telos of a sorrowful mystery, much like the melismatic ululations of the folk which decorate elegiac enjambments of the Pasyon quintilla, preventing the lyric from punctuating itself quite predictably, in sheer loneliness. It has to be said that while this aspect of colonial idiom is now read as an act of sufferance and revolution, what remains to be articulated is how dolorous maternity intervenes in activating intransigence. Sita in "Hinulid" could have fulfilled that post-passional reading.

Part III

It is quite strange that while it is Sita who is portrayed as sorrowful, the dolefulness is not demonstrated according to her lamentational terms. Instead, the agony is projected upon her through this Christ thrice interred. This puts into question the memory that her consciousness is supposed to verify as the truth of her mourning. Sita needs to mourn a dead son thrice: as child, adolescent, man. What is amplified by this triplication? I’m trying to remember Nora’s face through the three hours of Cordero’s Rinconada mock epic and for the first time, after all those years, Aunor registers vacancy. There is magnification, yes. Mourning becomes Nora, and thrice so. And yet, each time this is staged, in distinction or in simultaneity, the dolour, because of the imposition, is not pithy.

Part IV

This peculiar Santo Entierro will only make sense if its triplication can be argued to originate from the Mater Dolorosa herself, and in a relation of correspondence that is less reaction than receipt. The peculiarity of this Pieta must also be mariologically immanent. If Christ could die thrice, of course, Mary should mourn in the same time signature. However, the cinema of “Hinulid” must elaborate how dolorous maternity is thrice possible from a Marian perspective. After all, the narrative is told by Sita, not by her son dying through three ages.

Part V

Fray Marcos de Lisboa’s "Vocabulario de la lengua Bicol" defines “holid” as “recostar al niño en el regazo, o en la cuna.” To lay a child on one’s lap, or in his crib: these are acts of maternal nurturance. But this scene also makes sense as the Pieta inasmuch as it alludes to the Nativity. If Sita must inter her son thrice, it is because his death reminds her of the emptiness of her womb through his childhood, boyhood, youth. His death affirms the terminus of her being a woman. Hollowed out by loss, she embodies a desert longing. This must be Aunor’s late style thesis. My well of loneliness has been depleted. I am nothing. I have known all manner of fatigue. I was all womb before. Now, let me be his sepulchre.

Part VI

Sita mourns the 1) body of her son: 2) the memory of the body she has reared; 3) and her own obsolescence, which she must remember and grieve in advance. Pace Blanchot, one is never present at one's own death. If his son has faded ahead of her, the hour of her own death looms large in solitariness. Nora's eyes are vacant to honor the imminence.

Part VII

If one's mourning of the memory of the dearly departed can only be worked through intimately, the privacy of grief must not be reduced to the domestic. Memory is not stronger than justice. Memory is as strong as justice. If Cordero has written a screed against the capillaries of power through a matrix of institutions which plot the murder of its most thoughtful activists, then an autopsy of power must be demanded, perhaps not through the parabolic distensions of folklore, but within a critical ethnography similar to Nancy Scheper Hughes study on "death without weeping" among mothers in a Brazilian necropolis.

HINULID

Synopsis:

A woman returns to the village of Kagbunga in the Bikol region carrying the ashes of her only son via the old train that circles her universe like the tandayag, the primordial serpent. In a filial act of mourning, she will reckon and reconcile the thin line that exists between tragedy and transcendence and prove and that even the most broken life can be restored to its moments.

Director: Kristian Sendon Cordero

Scriptwriter: K.S. Cordero

Director of Photography: Guillermo Abrenica

Production Designer: Celine Belino, Ryan Cuatrona

Editor: Alec Figuracion, K.S. Cordero

Cast: Nora Aunor, Jess Mendoza, Raffi Banzuela, Jesus Volante, Delia Enverga, Ken Balmes

About the Director:

Kristian Sendon Cordero is a Bikolnon writer, a cultural worker, an academic, and a filmmaker. He has won major literary awards including the National Book Awards; the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature; the National Commission for Culture and Arts’ Writers Prize; the Madrigal-Gonzales Best First Book Award; the 2014 and 2016 Gintong Aklat Awards, and Maningning Miclat Poetry Awards among others. He has translated the works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Oscar Wilde and Karel Capek to Bikol and Filipino. For his first full-length film, Angustia (CinemaOne Originals), the Young Critics Circle of the Philippines recognized his work as one of the Best First Films in 2013. Hinulid is his second film.

HINULID Teaser

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