A love story between an Igorot man and an actress trapped in a TV is Cinemalaya's best film

preen cinemalaya tokwifi

Cinephiles, if you weren’t able to catch the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival this year, don’t beat yourself up about it. There’s no Letterboxd police in 2020. It’s okay to take your time in watching the line-up this year. However, our suggestion is checking out Cinemalaya’s grand prize winner “Tokwifi” as soon as you can.

Director Carla Pulido Ocampo’s romantic fantasy film is based on a Bontok Igorot folktale. It follows the story of a mestiza actress from the 1950s who’s stuck inside a television set that falls from the sky. She dreams up going on a romp in the rice terraces with a Bontok Igorot man who doesn’t how to kiss. If Ocampo’s name rings a bell, she wrote the screenplay for the 2014 film “Walang rape sa Bontok.”

It won the best short feature film category and the NETPAC Jury Prize. According to Cinemalaya’s award citation, it was chosen “for its highly original take on love between two persons coming from different areas and worlds and how identity and tradition could best be bridged by common humanity.”

For Ocampo, the narrative reflects on two significant issues: how women characters are “boxed” within stereotypes created by men and for men throughout the history of local television as well as how mainstream media continues to portray Indigenous communities as “primitive” and “uncivilized.”

On her acceptance speech, Ocampo shared, “This way of thinking is already part of our culture: when a director is doing a film, he would say, ‘my set, my staff, my story, my film.’ Shooting ‘Tokwifi’ has taught us that making a film is a communal effort…We would not have finished this without the help of our adoptive community, Bontoc, Mt. Province. I will never grow tired of expressing my gratitude to you.”

You can watch “Tokwifi” and the rest of the films included in this year’s selection until Aug. 16 on Vimeo. For tickets and access to the films, you can visit Cinemalaya’s website. Tickets are priced from P75 for a film bundle to a P350 premium pass.

Watch the full film trailer below.