Christmas in Manila means the annual MetroManila Film Festival.
Yes, I had the good fortune of sitting as one of jurors (again) of the annual festival of Filipino films when local cinema is brought out like the star of a Christmas tree and the Grinches of the world are lamenting why their much awaited foreign movies have to be pushed as far back as the first week of January of the following year.
Given the present state of cinema patronage in our country, we are only too lucky that it is by law that Filipino movies are given ten days in a year to be shown exclusively in Metro Manila cinemas (and not even in provinces).
For the rest of the year one only hopes that a movie or two (maybe three) will make money in the remnants of the box office. Indeed, let us face the sordid truth: bihira nang manood ng pelikula sa sinehan ang tao ngayon. With the advent and rise of streaming platforms and even hastened by the conditions of the pandemic, moviegoing has ceased to be the cheapest and most accessible form of entertainment.
(Consider the mathematics. The Filipino minimum wage earner takes home P570.00/day for his hard work --- without subtracting the cost of transportation and food. The average cost of a movie ticket nowadays is between P350.00 to P400.00. It is quite clear that Aleng Tacing and Mang Juaning together with their offsprings Letlet and Junjun can no longer afford to watch movies.
Consider this equation again. If Juaning and Tacing together with their two kids decide to watch a entry at the MMFF, the Tatay needs to dole out between P1400 to P1600 para makapanood lang ng isang sine. Joskuday. That means that together with transportation expenses and food (kahit man lamang popcorn), he would be spending over P2000.
So there goes the dream of binge watching MMFF movies like what we used to do in the past.
The annual Christmas celebration of a family is to watch two to three movies on Christmas day or during the stretch of the festival. You either try to cover as many of the entries you desire in seeing or you re-watch a film that you find as your favorite either by yourself or with new company. But with the somewhat expensive price of cinema tickets, this has become a luxury and only permissible to the few who can afford to spend close to if not P400 a ticket for each viewing.)
The truth of the matter is that people have become highly selective in the films that they watch in moviehouses especially if they are living on a budget.
Yes, there will always be those with money to burn or who do not consider the price of tickets as an impediment to their earthly pleasures. However, a nice question to ask: is this the Pinoy moviegoing crowd? Is this the same crowd who gets excited when a new Kathniel movie is on the rise in the horizon? Or are these the exceptional few who watch Past Lives or Aftersun in exclusive micro-cinemas?
Having considered all that, the hope is that this year's Metro Manila Film Festival scores as well if not better than last year's edition.
Yes, 2022 was a good reboot from the dearth of two years due to the pandemic. But still it did not (and could not) come close to the numbers yielded by 2019. It was like weaning a child to get back to his original form although realizing that nothing can bring back the pre-pandemic age.
More important is that the box office results of 2022 already indicated a major change in the preference of the market.
When Viva Films' Deleter of Mikhail Red, starring Nadine Lustre nudged out a Vice Ganda movie to be the top grosser of the festival, something was already said without being openly declared. The market who spend money for the festival was no longer the masa who loved a good old traditional comedy but opted for a horror film about technology and the dark web, about call center agents who turn nights into days and the lurking dangers in the computer screen. In other words, this is a completely different audience from what used to be considered as the familiar moviegoer of the past... especially those who feasted on the annual MMFF.
So where did the regular Pinoy moviegoer go after the scourge of the pandemic and the rise in movie ticket prices?
For those who have access to the internet, they are into streaming and YouTube and all the other available platforms that you can have at a slice of the ticket price without having to worry about dressing up, paying for transport or even eating out. No, they have not migrated to commercial television as well since it seems like even most popular tv shows (by that we refer to the teleseryes from the major networks and now content providers) have also found their secondary platforms through access to the internet-based venues like YouTube.
With all these drastic changes taking place, where does the MMFF hope to bring Philippine cinema?
The curated entries this year have more of the same categories selected through their genres: family-friendly, comedies and horror. But instead of the usual eight finalists, now it was expanded into ten to give more chances to producers to exhibit during that annual window where no foreign movies are shown in MetroManila.
Whether the addition of two more movies to the roster is good or bad will be revealed after all the ticket sales have been gathered and reported. By law of averages, only three (or at miraculously most perhaps four) of the original eight finalists make money. Two or three at the bottom end of the list will collapse due to the sheer weight of competition expressed through uncontrollable funds for the campaign. Far worse, if a movie reveals a dismal performance in the box office, chances are (as most likely) that it will be pulled out of screenings and replaced by the better performing movies --- or reduced to alternate screenings with equally underperforming entries thus reducing the number of showings by half.
It is a myth (if not an urban legend) to think that all MMFF entries make money.
The truth of the matter is that it is still a producer's gamble. Big, small and independent film companies scramble to get into the roster of finalists hoping that their movies will stand a chance of making ample money through cinema screenings. Otherwise, showing one's films on a regular basis has become a Herculean challenge: last year, for instance, only three Filipino films made a lucrative amount of money to earn profit if not break even. All the rest of the Filipino movies, although improving in patronage since the moviehouses reopened, still fell short of return of investment.
But regardless, having seen the ten entries of the festival assured me that it would be worth the time, money and effort to see a bunch of them. The curation of this year's festival gives a glimpse to all possible choices and interests for the cinematic experience way beyond the reductive pleasures of streaming. More important than that, the road map of Filipino cinema in the year to come can be assessed by the patronage of the local audiences to go out and see their Christmas movies again.
At this point in time, it is not only a question of economics --- but that of survival. Filipino producers must not be dispirted by the lackluster performance in the box office of their products but instead see this as a challenge --- and as a demand for change. We cannot be diminished to being content providers for streaming platforms: otherwise we will lose the very essence of our national cinema.
Instead we should look over and beyond what we limit as parochial taste and cater to an audience over and beyond the margins of our national territory. We should stretch the boundaries to an international market, turning our popular culture into an integral part of the soft economy of the country with the hope of globalizing our cinematic output.
But before we can do that, against all odds, Filipinos must first patronize --- even love and respect Filipino cinema --- before we can proudly flaunt our version of the art form to the world. If we cannot support or even love our own, how can we expect others to give our cinema the respect that it is so deserves.
So this is with the hope that Filipinos do go out of their houses and rediscover the joys of moviegoing.
Yes, it has become more difficult and inaccessible if not impractical BUT there is no greater satisfaction than stepping out of a moviehouse after a screening and realizing that there is so much of life that can be said in two hours or less captured by a beautiful film.
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