Carla Manalo

A reinvention of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in contemporary Manila as a rock musical.

Count is a short essay film that plays with the idea of internalized historical misalignment. It is a probing into the unseen discrepancy that has exponentially grown throughout the centuries. It starts with the author's sons, as they start their online distance learning, in the context of a pandemic raging in the midst of a Drug War, both with fatalities miscounted and uncounted.

Taking leave from their jobs at a gold mine, three workers journey to their home village on foot through the spectacular yet unforgiving wilderness of the mythical island of Hugaw. As time passes and their conversations intensify, buried histories emerge and a sense of psychosis invades the scene. As ever, Lav Diaz’s exquisitely subdued black-and-white images and patient rhythm lend a Brechtian register to the drama; almost always filmed from the same fixed distance, each scene is an immaculate tableau vivant. Behind the film’s folkloric façade, Diaz once again taps into the collective memory of defiant struggles against the tyranny of both contemporary Filipino society and colonial brutality, centred on the timeless image of men walking – one of the key traits of Pan.

There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness is a story.

Different students from a high school cleaners group each deal with different pressures of being clean and pure while also discovering that the world is dirty and superficial to begin with. Rent this.