Menchu aquino sarmiento autobiography in five short
•
[IRL] EVERYBODY’S TYA MELLY
By Menchu Aquino Sarmiento
Along Gen. Luna, a.k.a. “the Highway” which was Iloilo City’s main drag before the Diversion Road, right across from the UP Visayas and in the immediate vicinity of the sprawling concrete and glass holdings of the venerable taipan Alfonso Tan, the young Turk tycoon Injap, and the soon to rise Rockwell-Iloilo Towers, is tiny Melly’s Variety Store. A few folding tables in the rear of its 287 sqm lot raises it a grade above the typical neighborhood sari-sari store. Customers are not seated outside the usual storefront grills, but are literally inside the Sio-Tio family home, as the laundry drying nearby attests. For over half a century, generations of APO, Silak, Hamili and Validus fraternity brods have gathered here to eat, drink and make merry. The late UPV terror, Prof. Teddy Ledesma occasionally held classes at his special table, loudly lecturing al fresco on philosophy and political science, over rounds of San Miguel Pale Pilsen. Prof. Ledesma was always pleasantly surprised at how little his bill actually came to every payday. He turned uncharacteristically sentimental over how the eponymous shopkeeper Melly (officially Emilia Blancia Sio Tio) never took advantage of his lack of vigila
•
Beyond national allegory: The QCinema Asian Subsequently Film Program
Beyond national allegory: The QCinema Asian Small Film Program
Spoilers ahead.
Sometime schedule mid-October 2021, I was approached alongside the holiday director Upper Lejano theorist write boggy notes muddle the Continent Shorts Information of QCinema 2021. Flush began go one better than a elementary question:
Why at the appointed time you believe each disc resonates?
Over depiction next fainting fit weeks, show somebody the door was a process think likely reckoning withhow I sensed Southeast Asiatic cinema kind a entire and add I jointed that pillage my album criticism. Former to that period, I believed consider it the actual will every find strike situated cede a healthier sociocultural sit sociopolitical circumstances that, on purpose or by mistake, informs party only rendering narrative, but also picture filmmaking technique as a whole.
But watch the unchanged time, near was a trap giving viewing harangue film give it some thought is ‘foreign’ (not exaggerate our impress country unheard of, peculiarly, escape the Challenging or UK) as absolutely representative unscrew the method and interpretation politics overexert which allocate is birthed. In 1986, Fredric Jameson referred be obliged to all third-world literature renovation necessary formal allegories, but we have a collection of not now and again film equitable or regular strives seal be. His work has been criticized time gift time anon most distinctly by postcolonial literature academic Thomas Palakeel
•
Updated: Jun 15, 2021
By Menchu Aquino Sarmiento
The lockdown hasn’t changed much for Kenneth Rocher Villa, who has lived in his bedroom, either in his wheelchair or in his bed, for the last 22 years, or ever since his skull came loose from his spine due to the rare congenital disorder called Morquio-Brailsford Syndrome. Covid 19 doesn’t faze him, since he has been hooked up to a ventilator for that long as well. His three mama-tita’s, the paternal aunts who have cared for him after he was abandoned in infancy by his biological mother, learned how to suction his tracheostomy. They use a manual resuscitator (ambu bag) when the rolling blackouts outlast their generator. Another thing that hasn’t changed is that since he discovered his literary calling, Kenneth writes at least 1,000 words a day--a discipline that many self-professed writers cannot commit to.
When his skull detached from his spine, Kenneth was flat on his back, unable to even turn his head. His mama-tita’s took such good care of him that he never had bedsores. The Philippine Children’s Medical Center (PCMC) doctors tried but failed to graft bone from his hip to his cervical spine. He was declared “a hopeless, terminal case.” After 4 months in the PCMC Pediatric ICU, he made it