Magic of film can heal a bruised Philippines

Abaya's non-competition entry Bagong Buwan (Crescent Moon) is one of four Filipino films to be shown at the Tous les Cinemas du Monde.

"When a Filipino goes to the movies," leading Philippine film director Marilou Diaz Abaya says, "he wants to be healed."

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Abaya will learn on Friday if this notion is universal as she makes her debut at the Cannes Film Festival.

Abaya's non-competition entry Bagong Buwan (Crescent Moon) is one of four Filipino films to be shown at the Tous les Cinemas du Monde (Cinemas of the World) section of the French filmfest.

It is a politically tinged drama set in Mindanao, a lush, tropical southeast Asian island mired in decades of Muslim separatist rebellion.

"Cinema is only one of the many, many tools in the vocabulary of peace," Abaya, 49, tells.

"I think filmmakers ought to use it more for peace, which is a challenge to obtain not only in Mindanao but even in our own homes," she says. "I prefer it to a military instrument for political change."

When Bagong Buwan was being shot in the Philippines, the World Trade Center's twin towers were about to be incinerated a terrorist attack on the United States.

The polemical US filmmaker Michael Moore would later use the fallout of the attack to make Fahrenheit 9/11, which won the Golden Palm award for best picture at Cannes last year.

"As you know France is vigorously against any kind of aggression in response to 9/11," Abaya says.

"They were hospitable to host films not only from Iran but also other Muslim nations, but I don't know that they will look at the film (Bagong Buwan) as a political film," she adds.

"They don't have the Philippines really in the equation of terrorism," she says. "I think they are going to be surprised that there are Muslims in the Philippines."

With nearly two dozen films to her name the multi-award-winning Abaya, one of an emerging breed of Filipino directors who has had formal training, is a local rarity because of her knack for making films with daring subject matters that also reap box office success.

Her filmography tackles violence against women, incest, gender issues, environmental damage and child labor, among others.

A 1998 release, the historical drama Jose Rizal broke new ground as the most expensive Filipino film ever and introduced the tragic Philippine national hero, executed by firing squad by Spain a century earlier, to a new generation.

"You can make him (the Filipino filmgoer) laugh, you can make him cry, but I think that for 90-110 pesos (1.66-2 dollar price of a movie ticket) he'd like to feel a little better about himself. He'd like to feel a little bit more hopeful."

Abaya has said Bagong Buwan was inspired by what she saw in the camps for tens of thousands of displaced civilians amid a bloody military campaign launched by the government against the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front guerrilla group in Mindanao in 2000.

"I actually saw people die the way the are shown in the movie. The people died like flies," she said in one press interview.

After graduating from the Roman Catholic Church-run Assumption College in Manila, Abaya honed her craft at the Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles where she obtained a masters degree in film and television.

From the United States she pursued her post-graduate studies at the London International Film School.

Her career flourished amidst a general decline of the Filipino film industry, once one of the largest in the world outside of Hollywood and India's Bollywood.

"I'm not surprised that we've been producing fewer films, but we're also producing better films," she insists.

Of the 53 films produced in the Philippines last year, "I'm willing to stake my reputation that more than half have raised the level, on both creative and technical merits, (to one) which happens to coincide with what the international market demands or expects from an imported film," she says.

"You can't expand without raising the quality. You raise the quality, you automatically expand. We are now at the very least a regional product. We're a very good regional product."

Abaya urges Filipino producers to "put their money where their mouth is" and "take risks" by investing in films designed for the foreign markets.

Seven countries have been invited to participate at Cannes' Cinemas of the World section. The others are Peru, Mexico, Austria, Sri Lanka, South Africa and Morocco.