Fluorescent
Adolescence
Screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival
under the Short Cuts 01 progamme, Reminiscences
of the Green Revolution is a short film from Dean Colin Marcial, a
Philippines born New York based filmmaker. He is the co-founder of Calavera
USA, a Brooklyn based production company whose work has screened at prestigious
festivals such as Tribeca, South by Southwest and Sundance.
The film follows the recollections of one Yung Martin,
following his memories through a group of young activists planning the
occupation of the goldmine, in the time of the second EDSA revolution that
ousted then-president Joseph Estrada in 2001. For a film that exists on this
side of City of God and Y Tu Mamá
También, Green Revolution bears
the spectral DNA of its forefathers on its sleeve. Featuring seductively fluid
handheld cinematography and a competent ensemble of youthful characters as they
grapple with both their political ideals and sexual disentanglements, the film
manages a dizzy snapshot of what it means to feel young and eternal, to be able
to both harness impulse for a cause greater than yourself or to give into your
basest impulse to fulfil a most selfish need. The film complicates its portrait
of insouciance with a clincher of a conceit, by – SPOILER ALERT – having its
lead narrator, Marty, speak from the after-life.
With this neat little trick, Marcial manages to render the
ephemeral, eternal; it is no longer simply the prelude to the storm or the
night before the coup and the results of their scheme no longer matter. This
last night is now encased in the undying, free from the strictures of time,
because it, like its narrator Marty, now dwell in time itself. If ghosts are
immaterial because of a lack of the physical then time is spirit made material.
If I had but one request of the film, it would be that I
wished we had more time in this world, with these characters, on the infinite
pull of the night before everything changes. But perhaps brevity is its point,
that often adolescence, sandwiched between dawdling infantilism and
interminable adulthood, cuts through the muck and shines supernova bright but
is all too brief and all too fragile; a phrase by David Foster Wallace that I
am particularly fond of rings so true for this film – every love story is a ghost story.
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SINdie had the pleasure and opportunity of reaching out to the director to answer some of our questions for his work-
The film certainly with its youthful protestors, taps into a rich vein of current contemporary civil discontentment, with the protests in Hong Kong and Greta Thunberg’s youth climate strikes. What made you decide to tell this story from such a young point of view?
DCM: Because I’m a millennial? I think the most progressive and
radical energies in these movements have come from the youngs because they’re
perpetually borne into a world the olds keep wrecking.
I wrote this movie just
before Trump’s inauguration around the time of being at the Women’s March in
New York, so I think a lot of my feelings then were bleeding into the script. I
thought about how I felt about the world when I was 21 or 22 and had these revolutionary
ideas about changing it, and who I was friends with then and who I was in love
with, and all the little dramas we’d occupy ourselves with while we were working
together towards something. And it’s emotional— how can you not be? Cold hard
logic got us our present reality. So this is a movie for romantics, sure, but I
also wanted to testify to choosing people over politics. This is a love letter
to all that, and a dedication for all the people who’ve fought and lost and
those who continue to struggle.
The voice-over narration gave the film a distinctly nostalgic quality- like a story being countlessly retold and recounted – though its boldest move is to have its speaker come from beyond the grave. In this metaphysical leap, the forgotten and left behind are no longer forgotten and left behind. Do you see history playing a similar role?
I’m raising the dead so that someone can tell us about an
experience firsthand and have the distance of having decades pass. He conjures
up his memories for the audience and that’s the movie you’re watching, and
we’re left to wonder if that’s all there is after death, just wandering around
aimlessly as a ghost remembering history. Sometimes I feel like this ghost,
combing through scenes obsessively trying to extrapolate their meaning. Though
at least I have a body to act with, while the narrator has lost his, and could
only be a passive viewer to the march of time. It's up to the living to remember
the dead and take action. A lot of us who worked on the film have lost someone
close to us, some fighting for a cause (the Philippines after all, is the most
dangerous place in the world for environmental defenders), others to forces way
beyond our control— my dad actually passed away a few weeks before we were
filming. In a way I think his spirit is imbued in this movie, and I hope that
the some other ghosts inhabit it and get to live on that way too.
I understand that you were born in the Philippines but raised in Long Island and went to college at NYU. From what perspective did you approach Green Revolution’s historical basis with? Did it feel like you were working from an insider’s view of the history or was it from outside looking in?
Growing up a third culture kid, I never feel like I belong
to anywhere in particular: it’s hard to consider myself a Filipino filmmaker,
an American Filmmaker, or a Fil-Am filmmaker because I think my work spans
beyond that specific national experience. I feel most comfortable in the
in-between, and want to continue exploring those spaces.
Ultimately, though I wrote and directed the film, so many
people informed and influenced the process, from my producers Armi & Raya
to Gian, who brought poetry to his translation and Gym who lensed it, the dream
cast and crew-- so I'm not sure if it can be categorized as an insider or an
outsider's film. It's kind of a mix-- "halo-halo" in Tagalog.
Written by Koh Zhi Hao
Written by Koh Zhi Hao