BLUE BUSTAMANTE

Directed by Miko Livelo

Asia Pop! / Philippines / 2013 / comedy, family / 89 mins / Japanese, Tagalog with English subtitles / HD

Watch Trailer

BLUE BUSTAMANTE

UltraStar Mission Valley
Sat, Nov. 8, 2014 2:45 pm

BLUE BUSTAMANTE

UltraStar Mission Valley
Wed, Nov. 12, 2014 5:35 pm

Description

Official Selection, 2014 Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival
Official Selection, 2014 Osaka Asian Film Festival

Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) George is an engineer by trade who left his wife and child in the Philippines to search for work in Japan. He’s rejected left and right but is lucky to have a fellow OFW, Rene, with whom to share beers and laughs while George searches for stable work. Rene’s awkward fascination with George’s physique lands George a job as a stunt double for a Japanese sentai show “Force Five.” (Think Power Rangers, and George is the blue ranger.) Ashamed of the work he’s forced into taking, George refuses to come to terms with his fate. That is, until he discovers that his son idolizes the blue ranger, not knowing the true identity of the man behind the mask.

BLUE BUSTAMANTE evokes the 1990s in all of its glory: hand-written letters, landlines, men and women cavorting in spandex. Writer-director Miko Livelo doesn’t hide the sentiment or the nostalgia factor. For him, the loving, emotional subject of men desperate for work is sullen but also hilarious for its implications for masculinity and its imagination of the reluctant superhero. But the true nostalgia comes in the story of the young son who sees in the blue ranger an international superstar and someone greater than the provincial world he knows. It’s a surprisingly tender and fantastic look at the gravitational pull of family even when its members are countries and costumes apart. –Erwin Mendoza

Co-presented by: Filipino American Chamber of Commerce