Windsor International Film Festival

Film Description

TIRADOR (SLINGSHOT)
Director:	Brillante Mendoza
Country:	The Philippines
Year:	2007
Language:	Tagalog with English subtitles
Runtime:	86 minutes
Rating:	14A
Principal Cast:	Jiro Manio, Kristoffer King, Coco Martin, Nathan Lopez, Jaclyn Jose
Trailer:	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gf_Az6re9Hk

SCREENING TIMES
Wednesday, November 12	6:45 PM	Art Gallery of Windsor	Tickets: $10

Last year, Brillante Mendoza premiered Foster Child, which was shot on the streets of Manila in an urgent style that he and screenwriter Ralston Joel Jover call "real time." It looks a lot like what Paul Greengrass and Steven Soderbergh do in much more expensive films. Following fast on Foster Child's heels, the multiple award-winning Slingshot finds Mendoza once again taking his camera into the teeming streets to capture life as it flows right now. This is a fiction film, but Mendoza's impressive skill is to impose a calculated narrative onto Manila's constant unpredictability, shaping its ground-level chaos into art.

Slingshot opens with a bravura sequence: a nighttime raid on one of Manila's squatter neighbourhoods. The camera chases plain-clothes police wielding massive automatic weapons through the narrow laneways as they ransack homes, break in on couples making love and herd dozens of people out into the open. Only some of them are guilty. But in this neighbourhood, stealing puts food in your belly. Some snatch wallets and jewellery, some shoplift, others prefer more intimate forms of thievery.

Slingshot shows Mendoza's rapidly maturing abilities with digital cinema. What is more, he has a novelist's eye for the full range of human behaviour, especially the ironies of greed and vanity. One young woman begs, borrows and steals to buy a pair of dentures, but with her beauty finally complete, fate intervenes. In another scene, a gifted robber makes off with a woman's necklace, only to return it in disgust when he discovers the gold is fake.

The stories climax at a rally where politicians give high-minded speeches to thousands holding candles aloft in the night. But even there, the harsh economics of life on the streets rules the evening.