CineMET features best in contemporary films at MET Lab

Art connoisseurs and movie junkies can soon watch free films at the MET Lab's CineMet event at May's end.

Starting May 29, the Metropolitan Museum of Manila will feature films from different countries—including the Philippines—exhibiting 20th century culture through different perspectives and genres.

Five films will show at the MET Lab beside the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas' (BSP) gallery along Roxas Boulevard near Pablo Ocampo Street.

The newly-opened museum is currently running the theme "Brave New Worlds: My Utopia in Your Dystopia", which mixes Filipino and foreign art in its interactive and experiment space.

Meanwhile, a timeline of Philippine contemporary art will also be featured at the museum. Those who wish to take art back home without breaking the bank may purchase limited artist prints at the exhibit.

Schedule for films are as follows:

Bontoc Eulogy (1996)

May 29 and 31; 11 a.m., 1 p.m., 3 p.m.

It is about a Filipino-American’s life-long search for his roots through the villages of Mountain Province and through countless museums and archives in the US. In this film, Marlon Fuentes describes, using a combination of reenactments and actual footage, how tribal Filipinos were displayed like circus animals for all the “civilized world” to see at the 1904 World Fair in St. Louis. He shows how hundreds of tribespeople – after having lived quiet and peaceful lives for centuries – were separated from their families shortly after the American invasion and shipped to the States in inhuman conditions. On the train ride from San Francisco to Missouri, two Ifugaos froze to death inside their cattle car.

Le Tableau (2011)

May 29 and 31, 11 a.m., 1 p.m., 3 p.m.

In this wryly inventive parable, a kingdom is divided into the three castes: the impeccably painted Alldunns who reside in a majestic palace; the Halfies who the Painter has left incomplete; and the untouchable Sketchies, simple charcoal outlines who are banished to the cursed forest. Chastised for her forbidden love for an Alldunn and shamed by her unadorned face, Halfie Claire runs away into the forest. Her beloved Ramo and best friend Lola journey after her, passing between the forbidden Death Flowers that guard the boundaries of the forest (in one of the film's most radiantly gorgeous scenes), and arriving finally at the very edge of the painting - where they tumble through the canvas and into the Painter's studio. The abandoned workspace is strewn with paintings, each containing its own animated world - and in a feast for both the eyes and imagination, they explore first one picture and then another, attempting to discover just what the Painter has in mind for all his creations

L’HYBERT (2004)

June 5 and 7; 11 a.m., 1 p.m., 3 p.m.

Summary: A documentary on Fabrice Hyber, the visiting French Artist for the “Brave New World: My Utopia in your Dystopia” exhibit. It is a biography that explains his journey, work, and attitude, depicting the 25 fruitful years of his oeuvre.  Fabrice Hyber was born in Luçon, France and studied art at Nantes during the early 1980’s. He is known to communicate and connect his thoughts and ideas between works. To Hyber, drawing is an essential embodiment of artistic thinking, and creates story boards in the form of paintings to detail a thematic on his creations over the years.

Pavillon Noir (2006)

June 12 and 14; 11 a.m., 1 p.m., 3 p.m.

Summary: The film PAVILLON NOIR is part of a cross-disciplinary project that, in this case, brings together architecture, choreography and cinema. The work aims to create a space “on the border” (of artistic disciplines and categories as well as of genres of the moving image), exactly where the individuals and things transform themselves, change their status, their identity. As a double or a mirrored image of reality. The disinclination becomes their main characteristic. This other reality is made at times visible by obscure forces in the individual: the drive world causes brusque disturbances to reality, multiple incidents, abrupt breaks of the narrative’s flow. The film’s reality is at the same time strange and familiar. Like little “demons”, the characters parody with drive the fictional stereotypes of cinema or films for the television (sitcom, etc).

Pinoys in Berlin

Date and time to be announced

A short time-lapse documentation of Pinoy artists who made their contribution to the graffiti paintings on the West side of the Berlin Wall during the peak of the Cold-war tensions in 1988 just a year before the wall finally came down. — Rie Takumi/VC, GMA News


'Brave New Worlds' began in April 26 and will run until June 12.