Imahe nasyon

English Title: Imagine Nation
Director: Various
Country: Philippines

The idea behind Imagine Nation revolves around the Philippines "People Power" revolution in 1986, which ousted Ferdinand Marcos and forced him into exile. Twenty indie filmmakers were given the task to make a short film, each not exceeding five minutes, with the theme being the question: what's become of the nation since 1986? As there were twenty very short films, I will just review the program as a whole.

While the idea of this movie was quite good, I didn't end up enjoying it as much as I would have liked. There was the odd film that was well-done but by-and-large I found that the films were trying to be too important for their own good. Apart from the straight narrative films, there were reflective pieces as well as very artistic pieces. Some of these suffered from being too obscure as a result of being too artsy, and it just didn't do it for me.

When it began, I thought I would have been recommending this to all Filipinos (as the first few films were pretty good) but instead, I would say that it will really only appeal to film fanatics who like the high art style that is employed by some of the filmmakers here. As for me, I think I'll stick to David Lynch movies.