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Suffer The Children

By Noel Vera

The Hongkong International Film Festival had a carnival air, an adult carnival
full of sex flicks like Sex And Zen, and blood-spattered action movies like John
Woo's Bullet In The Head. With all the breasts and bullets flying about on
screen (and believe me, in Sex And Zen, the breasts do fly), it's surprising,
and not a little touching, to find that the finer films in the festival deal
with children.

Abolfazl Jalili's A True Story (Iran) is about Jalili's search for a boy to star
in his film, and how everything changes when he finds the boy. The boy, Samad
Khani, is handicapped: his leg had been hideously crippled in a childhood
accident, and eventually, his deformity will kill him. Jalili abandons his film
project and instead makes a documentary about the boy, to raise money for an
operation.

It's an irresistible story: a lot of drama, a little suspense (will the boy be
saved?), a wonderfully photogenic lead (Khani's face literally jumps out of the
screen in its naked emotionality, the way Leonardo DiCaprio's did in his early
films), and pure, unadulterated nobility.

It's the nobility, finally, that's disturbing. You have endless shots of the
director--crusading here, crusading there, barging his way into doctor's offices
and demanding to film the operation. He has the right to promote himself--it's
his noble cause, after all--but doesn't all that footage of himself tend to make
his motives suspect? If Jalili had candidly admitted he needed shots of the
operation to sell the movie, if there was a scene where he expressed doubts, or
wondered whether or not he was exploiting the boy, I might have accepted his
idealism. If he had tweaked his crusading image a little--cracked a joke or
crossed his eyes or something--maybe I could laugh and relax and believe in him.
As it is, I watched the movie with one brow raised, and no amount of
self-recrimination could bring it down.

Humorlessness is a crime you can never charge Jan Sverak of committing. As he
demonstrated in The Ride and Accumulator I, Sverak has humor enough for half a
dozen movies, in half a dozen different genres (The Ride is the Czech equivalent
of the road movie; Accumulator I is a satiric science-fiction romantic-comedy
thriller with a philosophical slant).

With Kolya (Czechoslovakia), Sverak has hit the big time. The film doesn't have
the fantastical quality of Accumulator I, or the bittersweet surprises of The
Ride; Kolya's feelings are more professionally orchestrated, the production
more expensively done. Sverak obviously aimed for an international market, and
his gamble paid off: Kolya won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

The film features Sverak's father, Zdenek Sverak, who also helped write the
script; Zdenek plays an aging Lothario who, for a sum of money, marries a
Russian woman and grants her Czech citizenship. Right after their wedding the
woman defects to West Germany, and Zdenek is left holding her ten-year old
child, Kolya (Andrej Chalimon). It's a classic situation, one of those genre
films Sverak loves to pick up and shake: you know that Zdenek will reform his
philandering ways for the child's sake, and that love will blossom between them.

Sverak, however, gives us an extra reason why Zdenek would be reluctant to adopt
the child: Czechs despise superpower Russia, and a Russian child in a Czech
man's care means trouble with other Czechs. Sverak keeps us constantly aware of
the racial tensions without losing the light comic tone: both tension and
comedy put tartness into what might have been an unbearably sweet film.

When Sverak stepped up to receive his Academy Award, he delivered the evening's
most charming speech. He spoke to it--the statuette has no visible
genitals--introducing Zdenek, Andrej, and himself as its newly adoptive family.
"Who knows?" Sverak added with an impish smile, "next year, we may bring home a
brother for you."

The incident reveals in part why Sverak's movies are so intensely appealing:
for him, everything and everyone is alive and deserving of attention: a
squirrel up in a tree, a fat pigeon, an Oscar statuette, an abandoned child.
It's from the same Czech traditions that inspired master animator Jan Svankmejer
to breathe life into his stop-motion figures, an old Czech recipe for magic they
teach filmmakers there: cast a spell, bring to life, enchant yourself an
audience.

Children Only Once (Minsan Lang Sila Bata) is a black-and-white video
documentary on child labor. It's also the single most powerful film in the
festival.

Admittedly, I attended only five of the festival's ten days. But after watching
this film, you have to wonder how many other films in the festival can improve
on Carolino and Buxani's work; you can't help thinking that the number probably
isn't very large.

It's shot and structured simply--as simply as Dante's decent into Hell. The
first segment tells of a Cebu slaughterhouse where children work from past
midnight to morning, shaving pig carcasses. The sight of butchered pig flesh
gets to you, and so does the idea of children working that rancid-smelling,
fly-infested flesh, but the segment is, unbelievably, an introduction.

The second segment tells something of the kind of social system that can force
children into labor. Ormoc sugar-cane cutters rack up debts during planting
season to feed their families; when harvest comes, the salaries go into paying
those debts. It's a vicious circle, one that gets tighter and tighter until the
parent have no choice: either their child works, or they starve.

The next segment shows children playing in a dock in Dapitan, in Mindanao. The
children invite the two filmmakers to come back at night, "if you want to know
us better"--a lovely touch, like being invited by a bewitched princess to come
back at full moon, and watch her turn into a monster.

There's nothing flashy or innovative about Carolino and Buxani's film, but the
two--like Sverak, like Svankmejer--have the ancient gift for narrative. They
have an eye for the telling detail, and they know how to let details accumulate
until, before you know it, you're overwhelmed: the film has hit you like a blow
to the guts, and you have to pause to catch your breath.

It's their greatest strength, and their greatest weakness is in not fully
trusting that strength: they stack the deck with narration that tends to tell
you what to think and how to feel. While the black-and-white images wash over
you, a gently insistent voice tells you that these children are "children only
once in their lives. They have a right to play, a right to learn, a right to
improve their lives."

A right? No one has a "right" to anything, not in the real world: children are
beaten, children are raped, children are forced to die slowly, through layers of
suffocating cement dust, their backs strained to breaking. It's a simple,
brutal fact that children are forced to work because they are too weak to resist
when adults force them to work.

Buxani and Carolino's gifted camera eye possess an unrelenting honesty that even
they seem unable--or unwilling--to accept. They have captured images too
forceful to support their rather wishful assertions; images that break down and
overwhelm their fragile good intentions. Children are children only once;
after that, you can't exploit them anymore.

Series originally appeared in The Manila Chronicle, April 1997




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