"Seven Sundays" Phoenix TV Movie Station
It will be broadcast at 12:05 on November 09
Today is a big day, Manuel Bonifaggio (Ronaldo Valdez) is about to celebrate his 59th birthday.
Since the death of his wife many years ago, the grown children have left home one after another, and the old house full of memories is now only the gray-haired Manuel and his nephew Ah Jun (Mike Eusebio) to rely on each other...
No, he would never admit that he was a lonely old man!
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Manuel was a community leader in his youth and was beloved by the locals.
Although his children are busy, the community has not forgotten that their "Captain Manuel" is celebrating her birthday today.
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He felt very happy in this moment, and the feeling of being needed returned.
It's just that the joy is fleeting.
Manuel and Ah Jun waited late at night at home, hoping that even one of the children would come and see him after finishing what he was doing.
However, he looked forward to coming and going, but what he expected was death to knock on the door-
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He was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and had only seven weeks to live.
Manuel did not hide his illness from the children. Because of this thunderbolt news, the children gathered together after a long absence.
In fact, living to this age, Manuel has no regrets in life, but just wants to spend more time with children. He made a pact with his children that they would be together for the next seven Sundays until Manuel went to heaven to meet his wife...
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"Seven Sundays" is a touching family film released in 2017, directed by Cathy Garcia, a Philippine national treasure female director who specializes in shooting romantic love and family ethics.
Garcia grew up in a family with many siblings, and her closest sister, who was six years older than her, had little in common. It can be said that Garcia, like the youngest son in "Seven", "grew up alone".
Garcia, who watched her brothers and sisters achieve top grades and performed mediocre in school, thought that she "shamed her father", and was always under great psychological pressure, until she found a movie as an adult, and finally found her own stage.
It is precisely because of this personal experience that Garcia understands that the parent-child relationship is by no means a simple relationship that can be judged by "filial piety or not".
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In his later years, Manuel wanted his children to come home to accompany them, but when he was young, he was absent from their growth due to his busy schedule.
At that time, the Bonifacio family had a special ceremony, because Manuel returned home very late every day, so the wife came up with a way for the children to write down what they wanted to say to their father and put it in a jar of paper and read them again when Manuel came home.
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When face-to-face communication is less and less in childhood, face-to-face communication seems less necessary in adulthood.
When missing your father must be disguised with "nonchalance," it is only a matter of time before "busyness" becomes an excuse not to return home.
The phenomenon of "empty nesters" is common not only in the Philippines, but also on the mainland. According to the "13th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the National Aging Cause and the Construction of the Pension System" released by the State Council in 2017, the number of elderly people living alone and empty-nesters in the country will increase to about 118 million in 2020, and will approach 200 million by 2030.
Without children by their side, these elderly people face many challenges in terms of personal, psychological and financial life.
Beyond macro policies and historical processes, what can we ordinary people do to cope with the aging of society?
Garcia uses her film to give a possible answer.
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Whenever the problem of "empty nesters" is mentioned, their "irresponsible" children always become the focus of netizens' verbal criticism, but the parent-child relationship not only has "children" but also "relatives".
It's understandable that parents are busy at work when they are young, but the rift caused by neglect takes time and energy to heal, just as Manuel strives to "plan" activities so that children can "stay bored" when they visit on Sundays.
In contrast, some parents always hold their own face and refuse to "take a step forward". If they are not willing to respect and accept, how dare children approach?
No one will refuse love and happiness unless they feel the exact opposite.
Like "Seven Sundays", Garcia's work must not only talk about the daily life of ordinary people, but also talk about "easy to understand".
She doesn't care about pleasing critics, but she wants to make films for the audience, for every ordinary person who has experienced similar troubles to her.
"Unexpected You" Phoenix TV Movie Station
It will be broadcast at 21:15 on November 15
In another masterpiece, "The Unexpected You", Garcia focuses on middle-aged women who are widowed and parenting.
In the eyes of her mother, fifty-year-old Patty (Sharon Cunetta) is fat and ugly, who can not keep her husband and her rebellious daughter in adolescence, and is a proper loser.
But when Patty accidentally reunites with her "unexpected" old classmate Coco (Robin Padilla), another spring of middle age makes her begin to reflect on her parent-child relationship with her mother through intimacy.
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Her mother had always tied Patty to her standard of living, leaving no room for mistakes every step of the way, and if she briefly derailed, she decided that Patty was a failure.
But Coco's inclusive love for Patty made her realize -
The love between relatives should be when the whole world is hostile to her, and she still has a warm corner to hide from the wind and rain.
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Such works with "down-to-earth" content and storytelling are of course welcome to the audience.
Directed by Garcia, "Hello, Love, Goodbye" (2019) and "Our Destiny" (2018), which still dominate the top two in Philippine film box office history, and her wayward attitude of not flattering critics has not caused her to lose the competition for industry awards.
Whether it is the "GMMSF Box Office Entertainment Award" that examines national and commercial value, or the "Philippine Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences FAMAS Award" and "Philippine Film Academy FAP Luna Award" that value artistic achievements, Garcia has won the title of "Best Director" many times.
Despite the award, whether Garcia can be regarded as an "author director" has always been divided.
The highly saturated tones and tropical atmosphere of rain, sunshine, greenery, and sand in her films are hardly unique to Garcia's work.
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And her narrative perspective also has a very keen sense of femininity.
Garcia's use of the Korean "Kim Brothers" as the only villain in "Seven Sundays" implicitly expresses Filipino women's dissatisfaction with a series of social problems caused by the large number of "Korean-Filipino mixed races" abandoned by Korean biological fathers in recent years.
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The relationship between South Korea and the Philippines has to start with the long colonial history of the Philippines.
As early as the Great Voyage, the Portuguese navigator Magellan led a fleet to discover the Philippines, which was still an island tribe.
Although he was killed by the local sheikh, soon the Spanish fleet landed and occupied the Philippines, which colonized the Philippines for more than three hundred years and brought Catholic culture to the Filipinos.
In 1898, the United States, which coveted Spanish colonial territory, announced that it would support the Philippine independence movement.
Subsequently, the Spanish-American War broke out, but instead of fulfilling its promise to help the Philippines become independent, the United States took over the Philippines and turned it into its own colony.
In order to strengthen the ideological and cultural colonization of the Philippines, the Americans introduced the American education system in the Philippines and required schools to teach in English.
As a result, the Philippines has one of the highest rates of English proficiency in Asia.
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Since the end of the last century, many Japanese and Korean students have studied in the Philippines in order to obtain high-quality English education at a low cost.
After 2000, with the blessing of Hallyu culture that swept the world, Filipino girls who longed for romantic love in Korean dramas fell into the gentle traps set by these "Korean Oppa".
As a Catholic country, the Philippines has not allowed contraception and abortion because it is believed that the fetus has human nature from the beginning of conception and that "abortion is tantamount to homicide".
However, when these naïve Filipino girls gave birth to the "Oba" child, the Oppa returned to South Korea after studying abroad, leaving behind a group of Korean-Filipino children without fathers, which indirectly led to the increasing hostility of Filipinos towards Koreans after the 2010s.
The "wicked men" Kim brothers in "Seven Sundays" are undoubtedly the embodiment of this hostility -
While Koreans ignore tradition, Filipinos gain the strength of affection because they value family.
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Like its long history of colonial aggression, the Philippine film industry has grown in turmoil.
Although the Philippines is one of the first countries in Asia to have a movie, and the number of films produced is also among the highest, the overall quality has been mediocre.
Cinema was just a business for both colonists and locals, and the truth behind the high production volume was the vicious circle of shoddy mode of "7+7" (seven days of shooting, seven days of post).
The so-called "golden age" of Philippine cinema from 1934 to around 1941 also relied entirely on imitating the Hollywood genre film creation model.
"Fillawood" used some beautiful and sexy mixed-race girls as sensory stimulation to attract the audience, and later even gradually "eroticized" tendency. In short, it has never completely escaped the shadow of colonial cultural domination.
In such a harsh creative environment, Garcia's work has become a clear stream in the mixed Philippine film industry.
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Her exploration of everyday love and family themes not only depicts the emotional world of contemporary Filipino young people in detail, but also shows her ambition to build local youth culture through film.
Therefore, rather than arguing about whether Garcia is an "author", it is better to sincerely appreciate her respect for the "viewer".
Her films are made for audiences. Without an audience, the storyteller will eventually lose value.
Post-colonial Filipinos too much need to construct a new identity through literary and artistic works with their own characteristics.
In addition to the grand narrative, the stories of the little people should also be seen; Beyond Manila's skyscrapers, stories of the slums struggling between life and death should also be seen.
ABS-CBN, the largest media group in the Philippines behind Garcia, has also adapted to the changes of the times, in addition to distributing art films through its commercial film company Star Cinema, it has also established two subsidiaries in recent years, Sine Screen and Skylight Cinema, which specialize in the development of more independent and niche film projects, aiming to discover and nurture new directors with a view to the rapid development of local film cultural diversification.
In addition to the consortium, the government has spared no effort to support the film industry.
Not only has Congress legislated to reduce taxes for corresponding practitioners, but it has also provided film development and production funds covering up to 40% of the production fee for film projects produced and participated by local people in the Philippines.
This November, Phoenix TV Movie Channel selected two Garcia-directed masterpieces "Seven Sundays" and "Unexpected You" produced by ABS-CBN, allowing the film to bring everyone closer to the unique contemporary Philippines!
Text | Remi
Editor| Fol Magic Song