Pinoy Short Film Tops US Film Contest

Filipino short film “Creative License” bested competitors from North America by bagging Best Film at the recent US National 24 Hour Film Racing Tour 2010.

The 2:30 minute-long Tagalog film, directed by Manila-based freelance film and TV commercial director/cinematographer Paolo Dy, showcased one Pinoy expat’s daily struggles in New York City. Representing the New York borough Brooklyn, “Creative License” bested entries from cities across the United States and Canada including Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Miami, Vancouver and Montreal.

Aside from Best Film, “Creative License” also won the Audience Award, Best Direction and Best Sound Design.

According to the competition’s official website, Film Racing was founded in 2002 by New York-based filmmakers Charlie Weisman and Craig Flamm. It invites filmmakers from North America to come to New York City, where they are given  “24 hours to write, shoot, edit and score an original film no longer than 4 minutes based on the theme and surprise element assignment.”

Tasked to work on the theme “Exaggeration” with the surprise element “pizza,” Dy and his team members Cathy Azanza (writer) and Christopher Fabregas (actor) chose to build a film “inspired by conversations we had with Pinoy friends living in New York and elsewhere,” according to Azanza as cited in Dy’s website.

She continued, “Like most immigrants, they are very willing to give up certain luxuries and make sacrifices to build a life for themselves. But, of course, their families back home worry.  Out of love, they find that at times they have to get ‘creative’– just like the character, played by Christopher in the film – to stop their families from worrying.”

More Dy, explained why they wrote the film in their mother tongue.

“We were very conscious about making the film about what was close and real to us, which is why we chose to write it in Filipino. At the heart of it, we just hoped we could tell a story people could relate to and a character people could feel for – no matter what language we used.

“More than a Filipino story, we hoped to tell a very human one,” he said.

Dy and his team were awarded a $4000 (around Php 170,000) cash prize, a one-year scholarship with Writers Boot Camp and professional film and audio editing software from Sony Creative Software.

Source: http://manila-bulletin.net/

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