Queer Shuttling: Korea-Manila-New York

I am a visiting professor at Hallym University in Korea, but my affiliation is with the University of the Philippines (UP). I was an alumnus of the UP undergraduate film program, and on my return from graduate studies in the United States (where I was mainly a queer-filmfest spectator), I helped set up the UP Film Institute (UPFI) as well as its MA film program. As founding director of the UPFI, I was able to oversee a number of regular screenings and retrospectives, including one-shot gay film events. Recently the UPFI finished providing a venue for the third edition of the Pink Film Festival (subtitled International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival). The eight-hundred-seat UPFI film theater has the unique advantage of being exempt from censorship, so the incentives for using it as a venue are obvious.

As was pointed out in several responses in the previous roundtable, the concept of an LGBTQ-specific film festival cannot escape being associated with the more generalized practice of globalization. In a Third World setting such as the Philippines, this gets played out mainly as an unfortunate alliance between queerness and a relatively privileged social standing, literalized in emerging indie-digital outputs where the filmmakers' entrepreneurial daring is contained by the attention they devote to middle-class characters.

There are several ways to argue how queer festivals may be ultimately superfluous in this type of setting. The Philippines' best-known film director, the late Lino Brocka, has a couple of foreign-released gay titles to his name, originally introduced to the world at large via gay film fests. Yet Brocka's gay films remain fundamentally conflicted, riven as they are by the tension between the radical unruliness of queer lifestyles and the normativizing prescriptions of organized leftist politics.

In contrast, the fairly active mainstream industry can occasionally still conjure up film texts whose queerness is sometimes compromised but also sometimes impressively enhanced by the circumstances of genre practice. For example, the country's most celebrated censorship case dealt with such a product, Ishmael Bernal's Manila by Night (Philippines, 1980), while a recent city film festival showcased a film, Joel C. Lamangan's Sabel (Philippines, 2004), whose real-life-based central character transitioned from heterosexual promiscuity through nunhood, wifehood, and motherhood, finally winding up as a righteous guerrilla sympathizer with a lesbian spouse.

One further reason specialized festivals need reconsideration is the fact that local consumers have better ways to access quality products without having to masquerade, as it were, in an aesthetes-only venue whose social dynamics resemble that of a Chelsea singles club. One could browse through the Muslim flea market area of downtown Manila, risking police raids and petty criminality to purchase the widest possible range of contemporary DVD products, including straight and queer pornography.

The significance of such a phenomenon has not been lost on U.S. Embassy officials and the International Intellectual Property Alliance, which placed the Philippines on its watch list of intellectual property violators. Battle lines are being drawn with increasing belligerence—not just in terms of shootouts between vendors and raiders but also in the spectacle of film artists and scholars "coming out" in mainstream media outlets in support of this particular form of economic transgression. With videos selling at about US$1, as low as 3 percent of the price of the same products in a "legitimate" Philippine outlet, the issue ought to be a no-brainer if not for the profit-at-all-costs machinations of foreign distributors—whose own products, we may do well to add, sell for significantly less in their home countries, as can be seen in the recently announced American line of one-dollar DVDs. Thanks to the pirates (or what I have called, in recent conference papers, anti-imperialist video-dubbing service providers), ¹ ordinary consumers can now shop for and program their own personalized film retrospectives.

Finally—and this is where my argument faces a number of interdisciplinary overlaps—perhaps a queer film festival does not really add anything much to a culture that already partakes of queerness, not...