Synopsis: Previously screened as "Voice, Tilted Screens, and Extended Scenes of Loneliness: Filipinos in High Definition" as a work-in-progress in last year's Cinemanila festival. World premiere in Rotterdam (single screen) and Berlin Forum Expanded (multi-channel).
Added a few more scenes after. This final version screened first in Singapore.
Years When I was a Child Outside is, at once, a meditation. It is a meta-film that unravels a journey, a chronicle of stories through foreign regions. It is a probing letter from outside circles, an honest account of illegitimate views from uneven terrain, and a narrative-driven exploration of the nooks and peripheries of the body, geography, and weather. As the journey progresses, the film increasingly traverses the countries of revelation, film, and heart to where all journeys are meant to end with:
Cast & Crew:
Director:
John Torres
Details:
105 mins.
DV, color
Sreening / Festival / Awards:
August 20-26,
indieSine, Robinsons Galleria
Trailer:
News / Articles:
...
Reviews:
"(The film) is a failure. A love letter to, in the shape of. A film
about making a film that never gets made, about the plan coming
undone, the dream revoked. John Torres digs the annihilating of form
but digs the annihilated form even more... Everything begins at a
house pelted by rainfall, much smaller than what the people living in
it thought they would move into, in a bedroom piled high with the
junk they can't throw away, where a kid plays videogames between the
oaken limbs of his sleeping grandparents, lost, as they are, in a
vacuum of calm. You know this house - - - you've been to one, you
know someone who lives in one, you probably live in one. And you know
the feeling. Failure is a universal language. And everyone's a
disappointment artist, adrift. The lullaby like rain fades as soon as
we leave the house but the sombre, aching, serene, tender soothe
pitterpatters on in my head, a phantom serenade to that exile in all
of us." - Dodo Dayao
"To my certain knowledge, Years When I was a Child Outside, John
Torres's second feature, will embarrass most of the viewers with its
unfamiliar structure. This avant-gardist video essay require the
reappraisal of some criteria used in the film criticism. Like
Baudelaire who suggested the distinction between 'a work that is
complete' and 'a work that is finished' (for supporting the painter
Corot's works), do we have to say that this film is
definitely 'complete' though not 'finished'? But I feel rather to say
that this film is 'changing'... The contradiction, the chaos, and the
imperfection of this film lead him (and us) to gain an insight into
the impossibility of the insight with regard to some obscure objects;
self, history and cinema."
- Yoo Un-seong
"With his films, John Torres is actually whispering and breathing in
your ear. It's a cinema so personal, it's like a confession. Cinema
as therapy has never been achieved until NOW!" - Philip Cheah
"One wonders at his filming methods--how much is actual revelation,
and how much invented for purposes of the story?... Torres has done
this before, and the detail he's able and willing to dig out for
audiences seems limitless. If he's simply pulling it out of himself,
he's one kind of artist; if he's making some of it up, he's another;
of course, he could also be playing one perception against the other,
hiding his true self in the confusion. Or not... You think of a
smaller-scale, third-world Kane, with his improvised storehouse full
of past successes; you wonder if Torres wonders: while his father
achieved and lost just as much, what does he (the son) look like,
with all his failed films?... The film is full of questions,
hilarity, tenderness, confession, pain; it's a storehouse of memories
and emotions that defy categorization, constantly inviting one to
come, dive in, and lose oneself in its many wonders." - Noel Vera
"Torres is making his own brand of diary film, and though things can
get incoherent at times, his approach freshens up a stale, overworked
genre... Feeling like "the child outside," yet also obviously a
gifted artist, Torres constructs a personal narrative built on the
fragments of various pics he attempted and failed to complete in
hopes of impressing his father. Some are dramatic (one co-stars Donna
Miranda and Ian Lomongo in an aborted love story project), others
more doc-like in nature (such as an amusing visit with one of the
Philippines' leftist "father figures," Jose Ma. Sison)... As
disparate as they are -- and some feel so off in the outfield
that "Years" sometimes loses its way -- the sections coalesce around
Torres' fave theme of trying and failing to connect to a loved one...
Pic's tactics won't work for many auds accustomed to docs that
explain it all, or for those expecting a psychological study, but its
steady, smooth pace, maintained across various settings and
situations, will be welcome to more reflective auds." - Robert Koehler
