Regional Cinema in the Philippines - by Katrina Ross a Tan (Hardcover)

About the Book

Examines the emergence of Filipino digital filmmaking in the various islands outside the Philippine capital.

Book Synopsis

The introduction of low-cost digital technology in filmmaking gave rise to new voices, styles, and narratives in cinema. The book examines the unprecedented emergence of regional filmmaking scattered across the Philippine archipelago outside Metro Manila. It offers a much-needed critical lens in studying these emergent films and practices in Filipino cinema in the twenty-first century. It demonstrates how regional cinema offers a new way of imagining the nation and the national cinema as an archipelago, that is, as diverse yet connected through the currents of histories and cultures. In the book, a reconceptualized framework for national cinema is offered, one that anchors on multiplicities, heterogeneity, and diversity. The new imaginary of archipelago in understanding cinema and the nation opens possibilities for a change towards a decolonizing understanding of cinema and an egalitarian and inclusive social relation in the national spaces.

Review Quotes

Unseating Manila-centric paradigms through an archipelagic approach, scholar-curator Katrina Tan's pathbreaking study offers crucial insights on heretofore inaccessible yet geographically and ethnolinguistically diverse Filipino films. Compelling and comprehensively detailed, Tan's inspired case studies - on film festival programming, indigenous- and Moro-centred collaborative projects, and queer short films - reveal powerful but marginalised alternatives to normative national histories.-- "Bliss Cua Lim, author of The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (2024)"