By Samantha Clerigo
All of us have spent most of our years watching various social sci-fi films created by Hollywood directors–Ex Machina, Blade Runner, Inception, A Clockwork Orange, and more. With these movies being set in totally different spots all over the globe, we can expect a large spectrum of emotions from them but perhaps not the full experience as to what would happen to us Filipinos in a local context.
But film director Jason Paul Laxamana is about to change up the game through his social science fiction movie Instalado. With this sci-fi drama actually taking place in the Philippines, the Filipino audience gets a more relatable taste of what a potentially harmful system can do to its people.
If you had the chance to choose between paying for the highly expensive tuition fee of a prestigious school or banking on a company to have actual knowledge installed in your brain, which one would you pick?
This is what Instalado’s protagonist Victor (portrayed by McCoy De Leon, the newest Hashtag member to gain indie movie street cred) mulls over in his head. Victor lives in an era where the rich remain in power through a new technology involving knowledge installation. Victor, the son of an old farmer, slowly considers this choice in the hopes of giving his family a good life and saving them from poverty. To him, it’s the ultimate free pass from sleepless nights of doing papers and studying for exams in university. And in a world run by highly-intellectual professionals thanks to the new process, it does seem like nothing can go wrong.
But then again, anything that seems to look feasible and completely harmless for a country’s citizens usually entails some drastic and bad results. And we’ve always known that after watching several sci-fi films already.
A particular quote from the trailer encapsulates the overall theme of the movie as one of the characters say, “Binili po ninyo ang katalinuhan ninyo. Kaming mga graduates, pinaghirapan namin.”
The film has been highly buzzed about online for being a game changer in local independent cinema, taking it to a whole new level. It’s not your typical, robots-and-machines-will-take-over-the-world kind of piece, but rather, a very Black Mirror-esque tale of how far humans will go just to have a better life.
Instalado is among the finalists of the TOFARM Film Festival along with Baklad (by Topel Lee), High Tide (by Tara Illenberger), Kamunggay (by Victor Acedillo, Jr.), Sinandomeng (by Byron Bryant) and What Home Feels Like (by Joseph Abello). The films will be shown from July 12-18, 2017 at Gateway Mall, Robinsons Galleria, SM Megamall, Greenbelt 1, and SM Manila.
Watch the awesome trailer here:
Instalado
Trailer for the Filipino indie sci-fi film INSTALADO. It will be shown from July 12-18, 2017 along with the other ToFarm entries in the following venues: Gateway Mall, Robinsons Galleria, SM…
Images from the Official Facebook page of Instalado