From Film To Farm

I have always been in the movies.  19 years, I think.

I love movies.  I love watching them and making them too.  I love the experience it brings watching it.  Movies introduce me to so many worlds from the eyes of its creator.  

I used to ask myself, "If I was not making movies, what would I be?".  Back then I 'd always settle for a lousy answer.  If I weren't in the movies, I'd probably be teaching film or acting for drama in some school.

Lately, I've developed a love for food, for cooking.  And if I were to be asked now what I would be if I'm not in the movies, I'd probably answer, cooking.

My love of cooking may probably have been borne out of my frustration with movies.  The frustration of seeing some crappy movies critically acclaimed or box office hits.  The disappointment of a lot of local movies that are badly done and are merited in spite of.

I've seen a lot of movies and witnessed first-hand the process by which they do it.  And it pains me to see that not a lot of thinking goes into executing it right.  Unlit night scenes are passed off as realistic.  Poetries snuck into the narrative to pass it off as art.  Stories are achieved through editing and not really from a deliberate and conscious way of achieving the vision for the movie.  Non-actors that don't know how to act are used to give the project that legitimate verite-feel even if it ruins the narrative.  Disjointed scenes due to a lack in foresight are labeled abstract.  

Cinemalaya and Cinema One are mostly training good writers as opposed to real filmmakers.  Most of the breed of young filmmakers now are out to trick foreign film festivals into getting their movies with their view of Third World culture as opposed to pushing the identifiable form and content of Philippine cinema to serve it to its local audience. 

When I started in Manila working in the movies, I probably had not less than 10 concepts for movies I wanted to do.  And I was arrogant to say then that I was pretty damn sure such ideas for movies will be blockbuster hits and critically acclaimed.  I never got around to working on it when I started working on a real movie set.  Mainly because seeing how a movie is done humbled me.  I realized I didn't know enough.  One by one, after each movie I worked on as a crew, my ideas slowly got weeded out.  I realized they were not good enough.  The amount of thought that goes into one shot of film is just so much that I figured, I will need to learn a few years more before I even venture into staging one scene at the most.

I was lucky to have been taught by the best.  Peque Gallaga.  He taught me what movies should be like, That movies should be that, movies.  Grand in theme, big in storytelling. Anything smaller than that is TV.  He has instilled in me that story is just the beginning.  It's executing it that matters.  Everyone has a good story to tell but to tell it in cinematic terms is what matters in cinema.   "The Road Home" was a simple story but it was really a piece of cinema.  "Crash" Of Paul Haggis was a good story, but it was not so much a piece of cinema.

Movies nowadays, in Philippine context, have become too easy to make.  Anything can be passed off as good.  A few laughs and it will be hailed.  A long uncut scene and it becomes groundbreaking.  A few dream sequences and it's already avant-garde.  A story about the indigenous tribe of Cotabato and it becomes a masterpiece.  Maybe my taste for movies have become too old-fashioned.  Maybe the world has revolved a number of times and I didn't witness the change it brought to filmmaking.  Or maybe, too, mediocrity has just become an accepted state of things in this country.  That we're already too happy to get a few laughs from Willie Revillame, get a few gayness from Vice Ganda or enjoy the butt crack of Derek Ramsay.

Movies are so unlike cooking food.  A fried raw fish is a fried raw fish.  There's no other way to call it.  A burnt piece of meat cannot hide its bitter taste no matter how you call it as art. What you send out from the kitchen is as naked as the heart and thinking that was put into it. If it tastes good, it tastes good.  If it tastes bad, it surely will taste bad.  You can't mask it with a loud sentimental ethnic Tiboli music or a melancholic, pseudo intellectual narration or some stylish MTV-type editing.  It is what it is.  Bad.

Over the last two years, I have bought a farm in Don Salvador Benedicto.  A place high up in my home province Negros Occidental.  The climate is like Baguio.  It is about an hour from my home city, Bacolod.

In the last 4 years or so, the government of Negros has made a highway from the North to the South of Negros using mainly Don Salvador as the main route.  I envision that in the next 5 years, that main route will give birth to a lot of commercial establishments from gasoline stations to stop-over restaurants, even hotels and resorts.  I've got my place right beside the main highway in the Northern part near San Carlos and that's crucial.

I started with a 6-hectare lot and now I have bought the plot of land next to mine, another 6-hectare land right beside a river.

While I was out buying the land, I was also busy collecting books on farming, sausage and ham making and now, I'm getting books about cheese making.

Here's the plan:  Build a farm on it.  Pigs, chicken, goats, maybe cows, vegetables.  By the side of the road, make a restaurant that cooks ingredients only picked fresh and slaughtered fresh from the farm behind it.  All the left-overs, turn it into sausages, hams and cheeses. The menu will be based solely on simple, organic stuff from my backyard.  No fancy molecular gastronomy stuff.  Plain rustic, family-style meals with no more than 5 to 8 ingredients to a dish.  

The restaurant will have a deli section and a coffee shop (serving only local Arabica beans). I will export a brick oven in the kitchen and make some freshly baked pizzas (I've got several versions of pizzas in my collection of recipes.  Just need to find the right texture I want).  Maybe I've been watching a lot of Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall River Cottage, but I really think becoming a farmer is not such a bad idea.

Cooking, as opposed to filmmaking, is not open to memorable lines for the trailer.  Cook the dish in the kitchen, serve it to the customer, peer through the kitchen door to see if their face lights up or frowns, then that's it.  Just like film, cooking is about taste.  But in cooking, there's instant gratification.  Cook it, serve it, they eat it and then you get the answer, as quick as that.  

Right now, I'm still in my movie making mode.  There's still a lot of movies to make.  With the newly re-established Reality Entertainment Company of ours, I will have my hands full in the next two years.  Developing and producing movies for, not just me, but with our stable of directors.  We hope to release our brand of filmmaking in 2012 hoping that we can put our work where my mouth is.  I really think we have a good bunch of movies in the pipeline.  We don't claim to be the savior of local cinema or the makers of the best there is out there but we'll definitely bring our kind of movies to the theaters hoping that we can find an audience for it.

If the audience tells us that our movies suck, that we actually just live in our delusions of what good movies should be, then I guess it will be time to put this dream of farming to work. Then maybe my frustration will be proven wrong and it's just right that I end up in my own little world up in my farm, cooking whatever the hell I want.