One of the more welcome film series in town, Asian Pop-Up Cinema (now in its seventh season) presents recent work from east Asia that might not have reached this city otherwise. Case in point: this Wednesday at the River East 21 at 7 PM, it will present Smaller and Smaller Circles (2017), the latest feature by Filipino director Raya Martin, with the filmmaker scheduled to appear for a postshow discussion. Martin’s work has received much attention over the past 15 years—some of his films have played at Cannes, and he’s been the subject of retrospectives in New York and Paris—but his movies rarely play in Chicago. Perhaps this screening will mark the beginning of a belated local discovery of his filmography.
I had read the novella version of Smaller and Smaller Circles almost a decade ago when I brought it with me to New York on one of my festival trips. People always pointed out how cinematic the book is and wondered when the movie version would come out. I didn’t think about it [again] until years later, when our producer friend came across a new version, which is the expanded novel [that was] picked up by a publisher based in New York. She was looking for a director to turn it into a movie. I suggested some names before realizing I wanted to do it. I even used a litany of reasons why I should do it, like when I was young I had wanted to become a priest in the U.S. Then it all happened quickly, and I suddenly found myself back in New York with our producer, licensing the rights to the story. We didn’t know yet that the local news would later be filled with reports of children being killed under the so-called “war on drugs.”
I wanted to avoid a black-and-white picture, not just in tackling religion but also in our relationship to politics and society in general. I was understanding more this idea that limiting our perception of institutions prohibits us from understanding why people do what they do within them. It’s similar to the Christian precept of “hate the sin, not the sinner.” It would become contrived if we started to reduce characters to statistics, concepts, ideas. That’s also a tenet of screenwriting.
From the beginning, my cinematographer and I wanted something clean and glossy, but also dark and moody. It was a big contrast from the movies that we were used to seeing in this milieu, but it reflected the characters of these two investigative priests navigating a textured city like Manila. Ironically, we had to heavily light a lot of the scenes to bring out the shadows and the sense of darkness that lurks around. A lot of people think Manila has a dangerous energy that could strike you at anytime, but there’s also a sense of calm that pushes it back.
Given the prominence of your films, along with those by Lav Diaz (Norte, the End of History; The Woman Who Left) and Brillante Mendoza (Serbis, Thy Womb), global interest in Filipino cinema may be at an all-time high. Could you share your thoughts on the current state of the national film industry and how you fit into it? It was such a different time a decade ago, when I started out with experimental and avant-garde works. Our styles were all different, but there was this unifying spirit of filmmaking that put us together in a movement, and that became the so-called national cinema. My experience is different because I wasn’t part of the film industry to begin with, whereas most older filmmakers produced films precisely as a reaction to working for the studios.
Smaller and Smaller Circles stands in contrast to some of your earlier features in that it’s more narrative-driven. Do you see any difference between making art films and making genre films? This is probably the biggest question that I’ve considered these past years, after not creating for a while. It’s funny to remember the time when I produced some early works. It was such a joyous, personal process to figure out possibilities of language and aesthetics. I think, at some point, I felt the need to stop and figure out what it all means. I think the reflection went back to the joy of watching movies that are engaged with our daily lives. One watches films to be transported elsewhere.
