Raymond Red
In Black
Anino (2000)
The Catholic Church has been casting a large shadow in Philippine history, culture, and politics, up to the present. For any filmmaker therefore this should be one constant problematic when a desire to confront Philippine reality comes to the fore -- how to address the manifestations of this influence?
Raymond Red's short film Anino, 12 minutes long, give or take, does not waste time heading into a collision course with this reality. The Church's introvert preachiness is quickly emblemed by a praying old woman unsympathetic to the tiredness of our hero. Here the Church, as against Christ, does not stand to embrace the weak and the tired, it here functions as a shelter for the indulgences of hypocrites.
Our hero, a "church photographer" (on the lookout for baptisms, etc.), is then met at the door by a Satanic angel-of-sorts. He preaches a realist type of Christianity, a Christianity that would cuss as Christ did, a Christianity that offers a world outside the Church, full of evil sons of men.
The extra-Church zone is a cruel zone, as it were. Here there are no choirs, no gilded saint sculptures. There are only pictures of negligence (oppression?), of power, shots of undesired modes of survival. Even our picture-taking of this world could by itself be a manifestation of privilege, by itself a stolen luck at the expense of another picture-taker who loses (or is denied access to) his picture-taking tool.
Indeed this is the kind of shadow that covers many in Philippine reality. And with that shadow is the Christ of Death waiting for our own, for only in a life edge "beyond salvaging" are we saved from our travails in this city of Man.
Truly, in this 2000 Cannes Film Fest Palm d'Or (Best Short Film) winner, death is the only poetic justice offered. But . . . it still comes in the form of a shelter, real Christianity's shelter we can call Home, albeit accessed only through a late realization (the Biblical "they shall inherit . . ." presented via realism's light).
This final sheltering is the only positive shadow shown in the film. So that we could be left asking whether this might be the very positivism of Christianity itself. And if it should be, then wouldn't Christianity be a form of Buddhism instead of a form of socialism? (VIV III, July-August 2002 - April 2004)
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