“Technology has freed us. Digital film, with its qualities of mobility, flexibility, intimacy, and accessibility, is the apt medium for a Third World Country like the Philippines.” Khavn De La Cruz, Digital Dekalogo
Philippine New Wave is a movement of artists, directors, videomakers, born in the first 2000s in the Metro Manila area. Internationally known for their punk attitude, for using suggestions from ‘90s Danish cinema, as Dogma 95 and the first Lars von Trier works, filipino videomakers stand out now in the worldwide cinematographic landscape after a long period of censorship and repression. They internalize the great national cinematographic tradition, in particular the ‘20s experimental approach, the ‘70s realism and the significant lesson by the directors Lino Brocka, Celso ad Castillo and Mike de Leòn, internationally known for their social engagement and the exploitation of sex and violence, purposed during Marcos regime, despite of censorship. Otherwise, the range of possibilities came from digital technologies and low cost productions allow them to shoot what is impossible for the mainstream, to document the most infect and obscured places of Metro Manila underground landscape. By other side, digital films offer to them a large freedom in terms of visual experimentation, using hand-held camera, changed colours, natural light and super exposition, etc. Philippine video makers languages are polyphonic and dystonic: from Lav Diaz minimalism to chaotic editing in Lawrence Fayardo, from ironic brutalism and punk vitality in Khavn De La Cruz and Emerson to pictorial void of Raya Martin till crude realism by Brillante Mendoza, an artist community, closed in the purposed of building an avant-garde and in the values of independence.