Tuesday, March 27, 2007 Visual storyteller By Mayette Q. Tabada
FOR someone who works with light, Ruel Dahis Antipuesto has an unusual affinity for shadows.
In Ang Pagbalik (The Homecoming), a short film written and directed by Publio J. Briones III, the cinematographer uses shading to tell the tale of a woman returning to a small town that’s unable to leave behind the 25-year-old rumor of her dalliance with the town priest.
In the opening scene of the film, which Antipuesto also edited and co-produced, light suffuses Argao, standing in for any small town where folks sit by the roadside to watch buses come and go.
At the edges of this sun-drenched landscape, shadows flirt. Trees cast crucifixes across the path Clarissa (Bambi Beltran) takes in going home, only to find her mother died, still unforgiving, two years ago.
In this brooding Eden, the thematic color of yellow—the banished woman’s bandana, her parasol, the miniature crystals swinging from her ears—gleam at first but are later eclipsed by the purples, browns and olives seeping into Antipuesto’s palette. His light and shadows seem to say: if this should be Eden, this is Eden after the Fall.
Ang Pagbalik became the best regional entry, as well as landed in second place for the best short feature category in the 19th Gawad CCP Para sa Alternatibong Pelikula at Video. Jerrold Tarog’s “Carpool,” for which Antipuesto was the cinematographer and co-editor, was awarded as the best short feature in the same competition last Feb. 16.
This back-to-back recognition doesn’t change anything for the 33-year-old civil engineer from Ozamis City who came to Cebu City for his 1994 board review but ended up staying to take photographs, learn lighting by “sleeping with the equipment for six months,” and then make self-financed films or “indies” to explore “visual story-telling.”
“You only need to know what you’re saying, how you’re saying it,” says Antipuesto, who believes that good shots should not get in the way of the story. A freelancer producing videos for marketing campaigns in Europe and the United States, his personal projects have him collaborating now in other indie productions and writing scripts, including a full-length feature he will produce.
With Tarog and Briones, Antipuesto has begun touring local campuses to encourage students to “find their voice in cinema.” Whether it’s trapping malice calcified in small towns or distilling regret in the day that’s dying in a pool of seawater, Antipuesto is more than up to the task of speaking in cinema’s emotional language.
