Get some culture: Four free films at the UP Film Institute

Four students and graduates of the UP MA Film program will be showcasing their films in a free screening at the UP Film Center on April 20.

“Gold, Green, Red and Stardust: 4 Mothers in 4 Documentaries” will feature Mae Caralde’s “Yanan”, Jed Medrano’s “I Love You, Piolo”, Shé Andes’s “Balitok”, and “Green”, a full-length documentary by Joni Gutierrez.

“Yanan”, Caralde says, shows how children of a revolutionary killed in an encounter with government troops deal with the loss of their mother.

“As they ponder their memories of their mother and the cause to which she pledged her life, they find among her possessions poems, letters, and recordings. Kept away for 15 years, the materials reveal aspects of Ka Yanan’s struggles that her children had previously not fully grasped. Yanan is a story about the ambivalence of loss and a sketch of becoming a mother beyond one’s very own children,” she says.

Medrano’s “I Love You, Piolo”, meanwhile, “follows the story of a particular fan club member, a middle aged woman named Jane who gets involved into the first ever fan club of PJ known as the The Solid Friends of Piolo.”

“Balitok”, Ilocano for gold, is a documentary that traces how gold is mined from the points of view of a 13-year-old small-scale miner and an artisanal miner who has been collecting and selling gold since the 1960s.

“Green” is a cinéma vérité style  documentary on Filipino-Americans. Gutierrez says the film “takes a casual but discursively rich look into the lives of Filipino Americans to demystify the idealized imagining of the people behind ‘Balikbayan Boxes.'”

Screening begins at 2:30 p.m. and will be followed by an open forum moderated by professor Arminda Santiago, Ph.D. of the UP Film Institute.

Cocktails at 5:30 at the Bernal Gallery.