Where the Night Stands Still Liryc Dela Cruz’s Where the Night Stands Still (Come la Notte) takes the only of storylines and renders it infinitely complicated. Three Filipino siblings, all home employees in Italy who’ve not seen one another for years, reunite at an extravagant villa the elder sister inherited after the dying of her longtime employer. They reminisce about childhood over Filipino delicacies the youthful sister and brother have introduced, and stroll the huge grounds that the brand new proprietor meticulously preserves as if she had been nonetheless a servant and never the girl of the home. But because the languorous day attracts to an in depth tensions construct, conversations flip, and buried grievances emerge. All of which is meticulously captured in haunting B&W, the ghosts of the previous current in each putting body.
A number of days previous to the February fifteenth Berlinale premiere of Where the Night Stands Still (Come la Notte), Filmmaker reached out to the movie’s director (and producer, author, editor and DP), an artist with roots in each the Philippines and Rome, about his thrillingly auspicious feature-length debut.
Filmmaker: So how did this movie originate? Did it develop out of your first solo exhibition, Il Mio Filippino: For Those Who Care To See?
Dela Cruz: Come la Notte was by no means presupposed to be the Come la Notte that exists as we speak. The movie was formed by an emergency the evening earlier than taking pictures, when earlier than touring to the situation the unique protagonist’s son contracted COVID. In that second the whole lot shifted, and we needed to rewrite the story on the best way to the set. We drew from the shared narratives which have at all times been current in our conversations, lived experiences, hearsays, and the unstated realities that flow into throughout the Filipino neighborhood in Italy.
This technique of reconfiguration wasn’t unfamiliar to us. My first solo exhibition, Il Mio Filippino: For Those Who Care To See, was additionally about disrupting fastened narratives and questioning how the Filipino laboring physique is perceived within the West. That mission engaged with archival photographs and performative gestures, however Come la Notte strikes deeper into the emotional and psychological areas of migration, estrangement, and the load of unstated histories.
In transforming the movie underneath such pressing circumstances, we instinctively merged actual tales with my literary references, and fragments of works which have formed us. The result’s one thing each deeply private and collectively constructed. It carries the load of improvisation, but additionally of inevitability, as a result of these are tales we’ve got at all times identified. They dwell in our neighborhood, in our silences, in the best way we endure. The movie grew to become what it wanted to be, formed by the very forces it seeks to discover: uncertainty, survival, and the fixed act of rewriting oneself in a international land.
Filmmaker: Could you discuss a bit about your relationship with Il Mio Filippino Collective, which is comprised of “Filippino domestic and care workers, artists, community organizers and members of the diaspora based in Italy,” and collaborating with them on this movie? I observed your three protagonists all developed the story, and are credited as crew.
Dela Cruz: I cofounded Il Mio Filippino Collective unofficially with the forged members in 2018, alongside fellow home employees, artists, and neighborhood organizers in Italy. Then in 2020, we formalized the collective. The main concern of the collective was to problem and recenter the narrative concerning the invisibility of care and home employees as a serious workforce in Italy and different Western international locations. A key determine in shaping each the collective and this movie is Benjamin Vasquez Barcellano Jr., who performs Manny. Beyond his function within the movie, he’s a dedicated neighborhood organizer in Rome. He was the one who linked me to many members of the collective.
I, too, have completed home work in Italy. This actuality isn’t international to me; it informs my perspective and my apply. Because of our shared experiences, engaged on Come la Notte felt intuitive. We have identified one another for years, collaborated in performances, and constructed belief by inventive and neighborhood work. I deeply respect the intelligence and creativity of my collaborators. They enable me to be the wild loopy child that I used to be after I met them, whereas additionally holding me with care, endurance and love. With them I’ve discovered extra about what it means to be human.
The course of itself was fluid and natural. On the primary day of taking pictures, I used to be nonetheless dealing with nearly the whole lot. But quickly they fell into rhythm with me, understanding the cadence of how I imagined the movie. Most of the dialogue felt pure as a result of it got here from phrases we’ve spoken, overheard, or carried with us. I inspired them to interpret their characters freely, utilizing their very own instincts and histories as main instruments. This unstructured strategy, the place the movie unfolded by instinct fairly than inflexible planning, grew to become an act of emancipation. I credited them in creating the story as a result of it was formed in realtime. On set, we had been continuously discussing, transforming, and pulling from previous conversations. I’d recall one thing from our shared moments and ask if they might inject it into their characters or use it as a story gadget. We had been a small crew, simply 5 individuals, so multitasking was important, very like in our performances.
But past practicality, this fashion of working was transformative. It proved that Filipinos should not confined to the reductive roles the West has assigned us. The “Filippino” are greater than what racist and colonial constructions dictate; we’re artists, storytellers, and creators of our personal myths.
Filmmaker: In addition to being an artist and filmmaker you additionally based a manufacturing firm, Pelircula, which is increasing internationally. So what kinds of initiatives are you creating?
Dela Cruz: We need to study how energy constructs identities, how fantasy and propaganda form actuality, and the way colonial legacies proceed to manifest within the current. One of our upcoming initiatives, Paradiso Orientale, explores the fabrication of the Tasaday tribe in 1971, and the way figures just like the late Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida had been used to legitimize this Marcosian spectacle. The movie follows Donatella, an Italian actress who, after documenting the tribe, returns dwelling solely to expertise a haunting bodily decay, her physique rotting as if cursed by the lies of historical past. It’s one thing very near me as a result of Gina Lollobrigiba went exactly to my hometown of South Cotabato in Mindanao, Philippines throughout that interval. So it excites me loads to bridge this story.
Filmmaker: I’m additionally curious to listen to how audiences from Western international locations versus viewers from colonized nations reply to your work. Are your messages totally different for every?
Dela Cruz: The responses are sometimes fairly totally different, although not at all times within the methods one may count on. Viewers who share the identical sentiments with us, particularly individuals who have a robust colonial historical past, typically acknowledge the load of historical past and labor in our works intuitively. They see their very own households, their very own tales, even within the silences. There’s much less want to elucidate the nuances of migration, care work or colonial residue — it’s already a part of their lived expertise. Sometimes they inform us our works make them really feel seen; different instances it reopens wounds they’ve been attempting to overlook. Either means there’s a deep, visceral recognition.
Western audiences, then again, typically strategy our works with a sure distance. Some are deeply engaged, particularly these attuned to decolonial thought, whereas others wrestle with the contemplative rhythms or the shortage of clear exposition. There’s generally an inclination to exoticize or intellectualize the Filipino expertise fairly than really feel it. But I don’t form my movies or work in a different way for them. I don’t consider in translating or diluting for a Western gaze. The work stays the identical. It’s rooted in Filipino experiences, informed in our rhythms. If Western audiences really need to pay attention, they’ve to satisfy the movie the place it stands.
That stated, I do discover it attention-grabbing when Western viewers join with the themes of alienation, household fractures, and longing. It jogs my memory that, regardless of the huge variations in historical past and privilege, displacement, whether or not literal or emotional, is one thing many individuals carry in numerous methods.
Filmmaker: Finally, what are your — and the Collective’s — final hopes for the movie (which you consult with as a “cautionary tale” in your director’s assertion)?
Dela Cruz: Our hope for Come la Notte is that it exists as each a whisper and a cautionary story. A whisper as a result of it speaks in quiet moments of siblings who can not discover the language to bridge the distances between them, of our bodies that carry the load of historical past with out understanding how one can set it down.
The movie is a microcosm of the world we dwell in, a mirrored image of a bigger darkness. We prefer to consider that we’ve got moved ahead, that historical past is behind us, that the violence of the previous belongs to a different time. But the evening remains to be right here. The similar forces that uproot, erase and devour stay at work, solely shifting their masks. Is the world really altering, or have we merely turn into higher at wanting away? If we’re not haunted by ghosts, is it as a result of the ghosts have stepped absolutely into the sunshine? We name it a cautionary story as a result of it confronts us with a query: If we declare to be post-colonial, post-dictatorship, post-trauma, why does the structure of violence stay intact? If historical past is cyclical, does that imply it’s inevitable, or does it imply we’ve got didn’t intervene?
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