Reviews

“Maranan creates a profound commentary on neoliberalism and the Global South experience that questions the status quo and celebrates the people’s fight against development aggression.”

Sine Liwanag, "30 Essential Films of the 2010s"

“Sa Palad ng Dantaong Kulang explores the harsh lives led in the backstreets of the port, a world of busy working people, ships, cranes and stacks of huge containers.”

Pinoy Rebyu, "The 50 Most Well-Loved Pinoy Films of the 2010s"

“A century ago, the city genre powerfully explored the images and rhythms of the modern metropolis. Today, indie documentarian Jewel Maranan turns her critical eye on the people of Tondo and their lives in the shadow of Manila’s ever-engulfing port to recast such urban visions in gripping human stories of violence, displacement and the human spirit. A vision that provides discordant notes for the 21st-century city of global inequality and brutal transformation.”

Citation, 43rd Hong Kong International Festival

“Maranan is one of the documentary filmmakers (with the Pedro Costa of In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth or the Wang Bing of Three Sisters, for example) who prove that to document is not something instantaneous and impulsive, but an act that gains in intensity over the time that it takes. In the continuity of the fragments she captures, Maranan evokes such a strong and precise sense of human freedom that it’s possible to believe that the heroes of her film are equal to the struggle with catastrophe that continues to be their everyday life.”

Chris Fujiwara, author and film critic
Marine Metropolitan: Jewel Maranan’s In the Claws of a Century Wanting

Reviews

“The Film Desk of the Young Critics Circle voted the documentary Sa Palad ng Dantaong Kulang as the best film of 2018. This marks the first time in the Circle’s 29-year history that the top award has been given to a documentary. Jewel Maranan’s film asserts a certain slowness in the urban Manila as to critique its violent accelerations. The film also bagged the Best Achievement in Cinematography and Visual Design award for Maranan.”

Em Flaviano, Young Critics Circle

“In what comes closest to Agamben’s idea of gestural cinema, this almost-wordless film evokes and recovers what is lost among subaltern urban dwellers living in the city’s peripheries. Where spoken language fails, gestures portray conditions of possibilities, imagined geographies, and hopeful futures even as these also drown out and disappear with the last flickers of a thousand globalised and industrial sunsets.”

Prof. Joseph Palis, UP Department of Geography

“Masterfully weaves together beautiful cinematography documenting daily hand-to-mouth existence of residents in the largest Philippine slum to reveal an ironic lyricism in systemic oppression.”

Citation, 66th FAMAS Awards

“This film comes to rest with the rainy season. Typhoons are brewing and the sounds – the calls of playing children, the creaking of huge loading cranes, the noisy life in the alleys, the rumbling of trucks – all give way to the monotonous and persistent sound of pouring water. Only now do we notice how transparent and delicate, unstable and rich this world is into which the Philippine director Jewel Maranan takes us in her film. Makeshift shanty towns built of corrugated iron, wooden slats and plastic sheets sprawl along the edges of Manila’s giant commercial harbour. The people who live here are poor, work as day labourers or load containers at night. The harbour is flourishing, its facilities are expanding, and the people are forced by the government to resettle. Five protagonists open up perspectives right into the heart of the reality of a marginalised environment. And whenever the camera – through the tarpaulins and sheets of corrugated iron – gives us a glimpse of the gantry cranes and piles of containers behind the houses, we also get a glimpse of the frowning face of the globalised world economy.”

Lukas Stern, Citation for 61st Dok Leipzig

“The towering presence of Tondo, Manila’s busiest global port, envelopes the lives of four individuals who find themselves sharing the same fate when the housing authority demarcates their residence for development. As a filmic symphony, director Jewel Maranan’s film departs significantly from the form’s predominant use to convey a cohesive modernity – the cacophony of industry permeates into domestic environments, where malfunctioning appliances are still used for its remaining utility.

The social responsibility of documenting the plight of the residents is well balanced with an aesthetical approach which unintrusively informs the progressions and repetitions of its images; while a sensitive approach to field recording harnesses readymade environmental sounds for its absurd quality, lifting the mundane droll of the everyday with a tinge of the imaginary.”

Low Zu Boon, Singapore International Film Festival

“In her unobtrusive lens, Tondo leaps from the surface depiction of the place typically seen in less persuasive media, which focuses emptily and narrowly on crimes and destitution, to an examination of the milieu’s changing landscape and its impact on the people who live and have lived in it, who suffer and continue to suffer from the lack of concrete and long-term help from the government as well as the unfailing advance of capitalism and commercialism… In Tondo, time is measured in struggle. And what the film condenses in two hours is not just the months and years in the lives of young and old people living in shanties near the port, living from hand to mouth — and sometimes living from nothing — but also the complex history of systemic oppression that has long been present in Tondo, shown in how the poor, in the words of one of its residents, “get poor treatment, and the dead are killed again,” evoking “the double murder of the Filipino.” No one cries in the film. But the audience, informed of such injustice, may find it difficult to control tears.”

Richard Bolisay, film critic, CNN Philippines
"The Best Filipino Films of 2017"

“The title of Jewel Maranan’s immersive documentary about the gradual displacement of informal settlers in Tondo has the poetic ring of Brocka’s social realist masterpiece. And in a way, despite the difference in approach, Maranan’s film mirrors the same inequalities and class struggles depicted in Brocka’s and other films of that era. Palad slowly builds the world not only within the cramped, junk spaces of Tondo but the modern world around it – inundated by industrial noise and the sight of endless destruction-construction in the name of capitalist progress.”

Jay Rosas, film critic, Mindanao Times
"A society in disarray and decay: Best Filipino films of 2018"

“A jewel of a portrait of the sky: as breath-taking reflection at day’s end, as blue TV screen to a window of the world, as howl to the heavens; a humanistic, dignity-filled look at the existential displacement of the squatter-residents of tondo (a former kingdom, where filipino independence was born), taking in unquestioned structural systems that perpetuate economic, socio-cultural, and political impoverishment globally. deserves to have won every documentary prize out there.”

Dan Koh, film writer, Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema member

“IN THE CLAWS OF A CENTURY WANTING is the best film not only for its formal aesthetic proposal but also from the depth with which it tells the situation of the disadvantaged with a perfect contextualization from showing global trade, colonialism, and utilization of religion by the state.”

Jury Statement, Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Buenos Aires

“That the large cargo ports in Tondo, Manila, are infrastructure for neoliberalism is no mere speculation; Maranan sets out to prove it as fact. Only images of these shipping ports, of robust cranes and vessels that tower over a city in poverty, interrupt her careful observation of the urban poor, as if to provide for stark contrast with the precarious lives they lead in their makeshift homes. This contradiction alone demonstrates a social structure that conditions even the smallest of decisions. It’s an evil logic that pushes these characters out of their community in the city towards remote relocation sites, where they will be met with an impossible debt to pay for their new homes and no opportunities for livelihood. An elderly lady in green correctly identifies the state order to demolish their homes and relocate as “clear business,” an obvious scheme to gain profit from the poor. Their community will be cleared, its spaces reclaimed by the state, to accommodate what else but more foreigners: the newly emptied urban spaces are only to prove ease of access, an open invitation for abuse. The best cut in the film is a dissolve—from a shot of the stormy sea and an intact community to a shot of the sea, calmer now, with no trace of the houses that make up a community. It’s an admission of defeat: cinema can capture social change, maybe even beautifully, but cannot command it. The people ask more questions, about how they might survive relocation, and agents of the state answer they have only to learn to be industrious, patient, resourceful—individual qualities indispensable in neoliberalism. Only bureaucracy mediates between the market and the individual, and even then it allows for only the illusion of rational thinking and compassion. All this the documentary determines with an objective framework, a scientific assessment of the capitalist structuring of spaces; it has no real, particular emotional inclination except towards the poor as an oppressed class. Maranan knows there is strength to be drawn from the collective: there’s suggestion of a petition to be signed, an alliance against the state. Nothing about suffering is ordinary or normal; the characters in the documentary know this. With no regular water supply to wash with, they gather rainwater in plastic containers. Someone makes a joke. The children play in the rain.”

Kaj Palanca, Letterboxd

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Trailer

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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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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