18/09/2024
When people make films, filmmaking doesn’t stop after they’ve shot them.
For Glenn Barit and his small collaborative team that includes friends and family, they created Cleaners by printing out 8 frames out of every second of the 78-minute assembled film in black-and-white photocopy texture; then colored certain sections of about 43,200 frames manually with highlighters; scanned them all in batches; and reassembled them all back together in the editing room.
The end result is a grainy, raw window to a bygone era that the film makes it seem like it just happened yesterday; a vibrant and explosive expression of youthful passion, longing and nostalgia; and a love letter to our past self, no matter how embarrassing and misguided we were during those emotionally turbulent times. Cleaners (2019) is a collection of stories portraying a provincial public high school life filled with the trials and tribulations, the absurdities and the chaos that plague the adolescence of a Filipino individual. Even if we have or have not gone through the same experiences as the subjects on the frame, they still feel like memories of our own.
Not only does the film capture the zeitgeist of the 2000s with the Nokia cellphones, jejemons and the emo craze, but it also puts a unique and oftentimes hilarious spin on school traditions that any Filipino is familiar with: the obligatory Nutrition Month and Buwan ng Wika; the mandatory dances; the uncontrollable and varied classroom gossip; the youth election campaigns; and most of all, the classroom clean-ups that happen every weekday (in which some of us would try desperately to avoid, while others would simply carry out without protest).
Cleaners premiered on October 15, 2019, at the 2019 QCinema International Film Festival, and won three major awards, including Best Film. You may catch the film in SM Southmall for only P50 per ticket, as the film is part of this year's "Sine Singkwenta: Pelikula ng Bayan", headed by the Film Development Council of the Philippines. The screening schedule is at the end of this album.
