Contact – IN THE CLAWS OF A CENTURY WANTING

SYNOPSIS

Four families live in the seams of Manila's busiest international port. They are migrants from the Philippine countryside who have ended up among the bottom quarter of Manila's population. In the hours of their ordinary days, they hear and see, the wealth of different nations packed as cargo, passing them by, leaving and entering Manila's shores. Anne gives birth to her third child. Akira learns reading and writing while foraging for scrap metal and coal. Eddie entertains himself to sleep with a broken TV before another nightshift work as a stevedore in the port. Emelita prays over the funeral of her husband. Around them and their days, the port is slowly expanding. Anne’s midwife, Paning, brings the news. In the Claws of a Century Wanting is a filmic symphony depicting the increasing everyday violence in the aspiration for a city fit for globalization. It captures a global process from the perspective of everyday life. In the everyday of four small homes, the film traces imprints of the larger world.

About the Director

Jewel Maranan is a documentary filmmaker, producer and cinematographer whose creative documentaries explore how history inches through ordinary life. Her directing and producing works, crafted in this pursuit, have been screened and awarded in international film festivals and art events–Tondo, Beloved (Philippines, 2011), In the Claws of a Century Wanting (Philippines, 2017), The Future Cries Beneath Our Soil (Vietnam, Philippines, 2018), and The Silhouettes (Iran, Philippines, 2020). Aside from her filmmaking, she organized pioneering cinema initiatives in the Philippines such as the Daang Dokyu Film Festival, Nation in Visions Film Festival and the Alternative Cinema Initiatives Conference. She is the founder and manager of Cinema Is Incomplete, an alternative film center with projects in the Philippines and the Asian region, and is the co-founder of the newly established Filipino Documentary Society. Her films and initiatives have received support from Sundance, Visions sud est, Asian Network of Documentary, Ford Foundation, Doha Film Institute, Purin Foundation, Movies That Matter and IDFA Bertha Fund, among others. She graduated from the University of the Philippines Film Institute and DocNomads Joint European Masters in Lisbon, Budapest and Brussels. She is also an alumna of the Berlinale Talents DocStation and Doha Film Institute’s Qumra and teaches as a senior lecturer at the University of the Philippines Film Institute.

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