Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil and Her Angels
by Dino Manrique

Last March 12, 2003, at the 14th International Women's Film Festival (March 4-14), which was held at, and organized by, the University of the Philippines Film Center, we saw a wonderful surprise of a movie. The movie was the digital film Angels produced by Star Cinema's now defunct Digital Film Division, then headed by multi-awarded scriptwriter Ricky Lee, who also wrote Angels. Angels was directed, meanwhile, by a hitherto unknown woman to us, named Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil.

At the UP Film Center screening, I was with my friend JP Carpio, the 24-year old director of another beautiful digital film, Balay Daku (Big House), the first Ilonggo feature ever. About ten or fifteen minutes into the movie, JP typed on his cell phone "[Expletive deleted]! So far the film is honest." And, indeed, for the rest of the movie, Angels was one of the more truthful Filipino movies we had seen in a long while.

Angels is the story of the Gonzalo couple, who are blind masseurs or massage therapists (Rudy and Angie, portrayed by Nonie Buencamino and Gina Alajar, respectively), and their three children: the 16-year old and mentally-challenged Cherrylou (Wena Basco), the 5-year old Grace (Joan Tan) and the 10-year old Jonathan (Michael Angelo Caangay), from whose point of view the story is told. Based on a true story, the movie, about the Gonzalo family's trials and tribulations, does indeed develop like a "true story" -- truthfully, that is. Unlike purportedly true stories with cardboard characters in them, the characters in Angels -- main and supporting -- are recognizable human beings, with virtues and flaws just like everyone else. The movie, although featuring mainstream production values, is non-traditional in terms of story and structure.

Another surprising thing about the movie when we saw it, was that the UP Film Center screening was just the second time it was being shown in the country in two years. The first time was in December of 2001 at the Cinemanila Film Festival. To find out more about this aberration, and other mysteries surrounding Angels, I, accompanied by my friend JP, decided to interview the creator of Angels herself, Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil, last March 15 at her townhouse in Quezon City.

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Looking around the small Ongkeko-Marfil household, you already get a sense of the character of Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil and her family. Hanging on the wall near the stairs are numerous pictures of her family of three: her and her husband Martin Marfil, an Inquirer reporter, and their son Keico, who is now nine years old. In a cabinet in a corner are various books, like one on Einstein, by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and sceenwriting manuals by Filipino scriptwriters Rene Villanueva, and Armando "Bing" Lao. During the interview, Ongkeko-Marfil sits on a swivel chair in front of a desk in their sala, and behind her, a big replica of a Picasso painting drapes the wall below the stairs. To get a complete picture of how she came up with Angels, I begin by asking about her career and early years.

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While in high school, Ongkeko-Marfil loved to analyze and talk about movies after watching them. But her real romance with the movies began some time in college, with Imelda Marcos's Manila Film Festival. She would watch alone, from early morning until the last screening in the evening and drown herself in foreign films. She also recalls going regularly to the screenings of the newly constructed UP Film Center, visited then by only a handful of people.

She was also working in the productions of the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA). Also, on and off, she worked for such cinematic luminaries as Ishmael Bernal, Mike de Leon, and Lino Brocka. But it was Bernal whom she considers her mentor. Bernal, in the sets of such films as Himala, loved to explain things, says Ongkeko-Marfil. In hindsight, she says, she owed and learned a lot from him.

When PETA went into television with PETABISYON, Ongkeko-Marfil learned the ropes of TV directing, encouraged by the likes of Soxie Topacio (who also appears in a supporting role in Angels, incidentally). Besides her work in PETA, she also held various jobs in advertising, TV, video, and film, earning recognition and awards in the process.

Then, after a long respite -- she had her child -- she decided to go mainstream because she yearned to reach more people with her works. She worked for Star Cinema as Assistant Director to Chito Roño in the film Eskapo. She also directed TV shows like Maalaala Mo Kaya. But what she really wanted to do was to direct films. The big screen, she says, has always been a fascination for her: she would make it a point to sit in front when watching movies.

So she went around and approached producers with a script, a love story, which spanned the terms of Marcos and Erap. Three times in three years, the movie was cast, but something would go wrong at the last minute, and the project would fall through. Eventually, Ricky Lee, who then headed the Digital Film Division of Star Cinema, asked her to set aside her script for a while, and asked her if she had another story. And, indeed, she had one. She told Lee that for a long time she was trying to get this story of a family made into a documentary, and perhaps it could be made into a film instead. It was the story of the Gonzalo couple who became her friends after she hired the services of the wife Angie, who was introduced to her by a colleague in PETA.

It happened so fast, she says. She submitted a storyline in December of 2000 to Lee, and by February, she was already directing. She surmises that it must have been "divine intervention." It was a one-month calendar, consisting of sixteen shooting days. Besides the grueling shoot, however, there were other difficulties.

For one, Jonathan, at the time of the shooting, was in a terrible stage in his life, having trouble in school and running away from home regularly, usually gone for days. "Jonathan was in bad shape...It was the height of discontent, restlessness for the kid," says Ongkeko-Marfil. These dark episodes found their way into the movie, and Ongkeko-Marfil was anxious whenever Jonathan was gone, because she didn't want to end the story on a sad note, like the child not coming back, for instance.

The struggles also went beyond the shooting of the movie. At the Cinemanila Film Festival, the version that was shown, technically speaking, wasn't really the quality that Ongkeko-Marfil wanted, mainly because of mistakes made during the editing. After the Cinemanila screening, Star Cinema wanted to show the film abroad first, to international film festivals. But being the perfectionist that she was, Ongkeko-Marfil asked them to hold their plans. She had fallen in love with the movie and its characters, and she wanted to do everything to improve it. With the help of friend and fellow filmmaker Nonoy Dadivas, they re-edited the movie, and fixed the audio. Because of their jobs and previous commitments, it was a long and arduous task. But eventually, it came to pass that last March 12 at the UP Film Center, it was shown for just the second time. Their hard work paid off, for the result was a movie that had almost the same look as something that was shot on traditional film.

Ongkeko-Marfil says she believes in the responsibility of the director. That there's this implicit duty to affect the lives of the viewers in a positive way, and not just the viewers, but also the lives of the people she is trying to depict. She says that, coming from PETA, she came from the social-realism kind of storytelling, the "tell-it-as-it-is" type. But experience has taught her that it is better to approach filmmaking from the perspective of someone trying to understand a person or a character in a story. She avoids portraying characters in black and white terms. She tries to really understand their motivations. And from her experience, this approach has really paid off.

And that is the secret of Angels. There are no "good" and "bad" characters -- only human beings. And because of such honesty, Ongkeko-Marfil reveals that the blind community embraced the movie. She repeats what they said: "Ang ganda-ganda..hindi sobra, hindi kulang, hindi siya hardsell." "I think they don't like being patronized," she says, trying to explain their reaction. And the reaction of the family? "You should have asked them," she says, smiling. Ongkeko-Marfil feels awkward that it should come from her, but she eventually admits that they loved it. She relates that they loved it so much that every time the movie was going to be screened, the Gonzalo family and their friends would help promote the movie by going to radio stations.

Ongkeko-Marfil would also like to think that, like her original intentions, the movie had a positive effect on the family. She is hesitant to take any credit, but she relates that after the movie was shown in Cinemanila, Jonathan, who by then had transferred to a better school and had watched the movie with his new teachers and classmates, became a child again. He had fewer tantrums and laughed more frequently, and eventually stopped running away.

When asked about her favorite filmmakers, Ongkeko-Marfil says that she likes filmmakers -- such as her favorite Zhang Yimou -- who make films which make her "think about life" and which are "rich in relationships, nuances and understanding of people." When one tries to appreciate what Angels has managed to accomplish, Ongkeko-Marfil may just as well be talking about her own film.

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An abridged version of this article was published in the Saturday Special Section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer on May 10, 2003.