BIG BOY

Directed by Shireen Seno

Discoveries / Philippines / 2012 / experimental, family / 89 mins / Tagalog with English subtitles / DCP

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BIG BOY

Digiplex Mission Valley
November 12, 2013 6:45 pm

Description

Official Selection, 2013 International Film Festival Rotterdam
Official Selection, 2013 Edinburgh International Film Festival

“I am a boy,” the English teacher reads from her son’s exercise book. “When I grow up I want to be a blank. Present, past, future.” And as in so much of BIG BOY, everyday moments take on a surreal poetic quality. Set in a 1950s village in the Philippines, the movie follows a gangly boy living in a world of simple pleasures: a family feast of crabs, drawing pictures in the dirt, riding home asleep on his dad’s back – and at the same time stoically bearing his father’s attempts to literally stretch him into an advertisement for his miracle “growth oil.”

The first feature written and directed by Shireen Seno, BIG BOY is largely inspired by stories her father told her about his childhood in Mindoro. And so it is less a period piece than a dream of fragmented memories. Seno’s background is as a still photographer, and she approaches filmmaking with an adventurous no-rules attitude – like she is inventing the first movie. Shooting with not-so-dead 8mm film, Seno mines the “flaws” of the medium for potent effects: the way the picture teems with grain, dirt, and hair; how the whir of the camera reminds us someone’s here; and the comic book color blocks that divide up the world. –Lev Kalman