Ode to Nothing
Directed by Dwein Ruedas Baltazar
Hosted by Producers Kritz Anthony Gazmen and Olivia Lamasan
Official selection
Qcinema International Film Festival 2018, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2019
Honors
Best film - Best Screenplay - Best Actress - Best Director, Qcinema International Film Festival 2018
Best Cinematography and Best Production Design, The Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences Awards 2019
Director
Dwein Ruedas Baltazar
Writer
Dwein Ruedas Baltazar
Cast
Dido Dela Paz, Anthony Falcon, Joonee Gamboa, Angelita Loresco, Marietta Subong
Producer
Bianca Balbuena, Iana Celest Bernardez, Kriz Gazmen, Marizel Samson-Martinez
Cinematographer
Neil Daza
Sound Designer
Immanuel Verona
Composer
Richard Gonzales
Editor
Dwein Ruedas Baltazar
contact
Epicmedia Productions, Inc.
“Easily one of the year’s standouts…Reminiscent of Lino Brocka but inventive in and of itself”Juaniyo Arcellana, PHILIPPINE STAR GLOBAL
Sonya (Marietta Subong) — a former maid, now largely ignored by those around her — is a living ghost, struggling to keep her family-owned funeral home afloat. Lonely and thoroughly alienated by an insistent bailiff, she wanders insider her own home, leaning heavily on her favourite Chinese song recorded on a broken cassette tape, hardly coping with the hardship of the passing hours… That is, until an unexpected corpse lands, rather illicitly, at her footstep. Soon, others follow — not many, but enough to stay in business somehow. Sonya, increasingly convinced that the unclaimed body is bringing her good fortune, keeps the elderly woman’s remains for companionship… pulled, with every passing day, into the cadaver’s mystique.
Dwein Ruedas Baltazar’s third feature, following MAMAY UMENG and I LIKE YOU WITH ALL MY HYPOTHALAMUS, is a powerful meditation on loneliness, small-town alienation, and the ineluctability and omnipresence of death — given form, here, as a true cohabitation with one’s own desuetude. One of the strangest, boldest and most captivating films to emerge from the Philippines this year and last (a Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay winner at QCinema, Quezon City’s influential festival of new Filipino cinema), ODE TO NOTHING unfolds in a languid and hypnotic manner, every careful shot oozing with detail and lived-in texture (down to the humidity of the locale). Though not for the faint of heart, as you can practically smell the film’s decaying atmosphere, ODE TO NOTHING prefers gentle probing to outright scares, recalling recent art-horror hybrids such as A GHOST STORY (Camera Lucida 2017) with a dash of necrophilia in lieu of the supernatural, and culminating into an equally beautiful, macabre, melancholy and compassionate interrogation of our universal longing for connection, in increasingly precarious, uncertain and isolating times. – Ariel Esteban Cayer
Showings
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
House of Hummingbird
Kim Bora
A new teacher takes Eun-hee under her wing and teaches her to raise her head to finally be respected. Filmmaker Kim Bora has just taken her place among Korean film stars with the masterpiece HOUSE OF HUMMI...
Brave Father Online - Our Story of Final...
Teruo Noguchi, Kiyoshi Yamamoto
Operation Dad the Warrior of Light is a go! But real life isn’t a game… The latest feature film from the gaming franchise, an inspired combination of virtual combat, animated melodrama and real-world domes...
Chiwawa
Ken Ninomiya
Beautiful Chiwawa’s incessant desire for attention eventually got the better of her. From Ken Ninomiya (THE LIMIT OF SLEEPING BEAUTY), a feast for the senses that, like its title character, will surely fas...