Taon noong ako'y anak sa labas (Years When I Was a Child Outside, John Torres, 2008)

John Torres' latest film Taon noong ako'y anak sa labas (Years When I Was a Child Outside, 2008) will screen at Mogwai, Cubao X, on June 17, 8 p.m.

The film was screened in 38th Rotterdam International Film Festival, the 38th Berlinale's International Forum on New Cinema, and the 21st Singapore International Film Festival. It also received a glowing notice from Robert Koehler in Variety Magazine. Our very own oggsmoggs wrote a nice review of an earlier version of the film, titled Voices, Tilted Screens and Extended Scenes of Loneliness: Filipinos in High Definition (2007).

I've got an article on the film in Businessworld, coming out on the same day as the screening. A brief excerpt from the article:

The telltale heart

John Torres' "Taon noong ako'y anak sa labas" (Years When I Was a Child Outside, 2008) starts out with the key event described in the film's title: the revelation that his father had another family, sired three children that neither Torres nor his mother knew anything about.

It's traumatic enough an event for any family to endure; for Torres it was reason enough to leave home and try make sense of his life not through discussion, or diary-writing, or any kind of easy, tension-relieving dramaturgy (yelling at his father, or at the stars or something), but through some kind of cinematic digestion--taking bits and pieces of his life into himself, meditating over them for a time, then regurgitating them, transformed, on the big screen.