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‘Anino’ director M.G. Evangelista on genre and identity
Filmmaker M.G. Evangelista joins us to discuss their horror short 'Anino,’ premiering at this year's NewFest. Our conversation explores the integral role of language in shaping their film's narrative and the ongoing search for identity that drives their work. M.G. opens up about their venture into genre filmmaking with this monster story, revealing how horror became a vehicle for exploring deeper personal themes.
We also delve into the extensive development journey of their debut feature 'Burning Well,' which has been in progress for over five years. M.G. shares insights into the challenges and evolution of bringing this project to life, demonstrating the patience and persistence required in independent filmmaking.
Transcript
You are listening to the we need to Talk About Oscar podcast, and this is our conversation with MG Evangelista, director of the short film Anino.
Speaker B:I think that's so important to me is that I'm able to just not stick to one genre.
Speaker B:If I can find ways of just being able to play with different forms, different artists, and if we're able to say something a little bit different about love or say something new.
Speaker A:Your officially, unofficially, first short in a Neo, your mother you shot in the Philippines and is also in, I believe, Tagalog in its entirety.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:From then on, friend is Summer in English, some Spanish and English in La Gloria.
Speaker A:But then in your latest Anino, it's English and Tagalog.
Speaker A:What does language mean for you personally and for your craft?
Speaker B:That's a really good question.
Speaker B:I think for me, it's something that it's so, like, I feel like from someone I do believe, like, I coming from both the Philippines and, like, born in the Philippines, but grew up in the Bay Area and then had this relationship of going back and forth because I had family in both these places.
Speaker B:Language to be able to go between English and Tagalog was so important because I don't think one really captures the other in any way that's, like, fully.
Speaker B:And I don't know, I never feel like I'm, like, succinct in both, but I think combined, it's the best combination for me because I do think I do have expressions and, you know, I hear, like, the voice of my mom a lot who is constantly only speaking to me in Tagalog and I'm answering in English that I. I think it's just somehow naturally kind of infused itself in my work.
Speaker B:And that's something that I continue to do even when I write and I have these, you know, different characters who are from all these different places.
Speaker B:I think language is always one way to just be able to.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Express yourself.
Speaker B:And I think sometimes with my characters in the films that I.
Speaker B:And the things that I'm writing, they have a difficult time expressing themselves.
Speaker B:You know, it's sometimes it's not enough to say things.
Speaker B:It's.
Speaker B:It's.
Speaker B:It's by what they do.
Speaker B:And like, even that sometimes it's hard.
Speaker B:It's always the buildup to that kind of expression that is really something that I'm interested in.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And also at the same time, it doesn't have to feel like, I don't know, an outlier or anything out of the ordinary, since I believe it's not at all Unusual in the Philippines, this mixture of using Tagalog and English, not even fusing one into the other.
Speaker A:But, yeah, pretty much the same amount.
Speaker B:Well, they call it Taglish there.
Speaker B:And, yeah, I'm good in neither, really.
Speaker B:And so it's this thing that I'm constantly feeling like I want to just keep working on, but also.
Speaker B:And by doing that, I put it in my work and try to practice it that way.
Speaker A:Coming from Hungary, we have Hanglish as well.
Speaker B:Okay, perfect.
Speaker A:And one of the major, if not the major themes, motifs in your work when it comes to covering and showcasing identity and then bringing heritage into the picture as well.
Speaker A:I already know this is such a big question, but to what extent are you interrogating those concepts themselves and yet finding.
Speaker A:Searching for yourself within them?
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great question because that's almost like a question that comes up in applications a lot when we're, like, writing for grants and, like, our filmmaker statement.
Speaker B:And it's true.
Speaker B:I think for me, filmmaking, writing is a way to investigate, like, where I'm from and the different worlds that I kind of am going in between and coming from.
Speaker B:And I think for me, filmmaking has always been this way to understand but also try to engage in, like, certain concepts.
Speaker B:And it's been quite like a privilege to, you know, dig deep, redo the research.
Speaker B:You know, being able to talk to, you know, family or parents and have that way, have this art or this medium as a way to kind of learn more and ask questions, I think has been so important in my practice and process that, yeah, so much of what I am looking for is trying to understand where I'm from, but also in a larger context.
Speaker B:It's like, how to be, how to live, how to thrive, which is like, to thrive as a Philippine.
Speaker B:There's a whole saying in Tagalog, which is Mapuhay, which is to live.
Speaker B:And I think for me, it's like, when I'm writing my story, when I'm making a film, I'm always trying to ask, how do I live?
Speaker B:How to live or, like, how to die, even, you know, I think Tarkovsky had a whole thing about how art.
Speaker B:And this is, like, not an accurate quote, but he does say something like, art is a way to understand how to live and so how to die well.
Speaker B:And I think that that's something that I'm also interested in figuring out.
Speaker B:And I think one of the things that comes out when I'm questioning and looking into identity and heritage is how does one love then?
Speaker B:Because I think part of thriving is the act of loving.
Speaker B:And so much of.
Speaker B:I feel like my characters are battling that kind of feeling of how can I feel so myself that I can love or I can live well.
Speaker A:And friend.
Speaker A: ment since at least spring of: Speaker A:That's, of course, years of gestating, developing, waiting, exercising patience.
Speaker A:What does that kind of timeline do to you as a filmmaker and as a person?
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, you know, I think there was a misconception that if you make a short and it gets into Sundance right away, your feature is going to happen.
Speaker B:And that is clearly not the case for.
Speaker B:For myself.
Speaker B:So it was a.
Speaker B:It was a real.
Speaker B:It's been a real sort of learning about.
Speaker B: in this time frame, I think,: Speaker B:So much of life, other stuff has happened in the world that I think has also, you know, contributed to and changed the way films are being made.
Speaker B:Obviously, there's so many different ways now to make it.
Speaker B:And I think for me, it's been a test in patience, but also trying to adapt and figure out, okay, how do I make this?
Speaker B:Because how do I continue to push my story, move forward with the project?
Speaker B:And, you know, I think it's been really amazing just the kind of support the film has gotten with labs like through Tribeca, Tribeca Film Institute, through Torino Film Institute, like, all of these places that I've gotten to workshop the film in different and different aspects, from screenwriting to production.
Speaker B:And it's been incredible in that sense of just finding, you know, support where it may not be, you know, because it's a.
Speaker B:It's a.
Speaker B:It's a film that's about identity and it's about gender and it's about sexuality.
Speaker B:It's so many.
Speaker B:It's about so many different things.
Speaker B:And I think that, you know, right now those things are being attacked and by an administration that is so hostile and violent to so many people who they deem other.
Speaker B:And so I think it's been a real sort of test in, like, endurance as well, and how to just make it better.
Speaker B:Because I think that's kind of what time is.
Speaker B:Is doing for me is like, I get to leave the script being really happy with it, and then, you know, a month or two later, I'm going back to it.
Speaker B:I'm like, wait, what did I just write?
Speaker B:And I think that kind of time has been really helpful.
Speaker B: plan is to shoot next summer,: Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:And we're really gearing up towards that.
Speaker B:So, yeah, I'm excited because I think it's just time has made it better.
Speaker B:It's made me more mature.
Speaker B:I think that, you know, the concepts that I'm exploring in it, which does have to do with Burning well, is about this young guy who's kind of made himself in New York, right?
Speaker B:And he's having a little corn life crisis and gets called back home and finds that his mom, who's, like, this immigrant nurse, is now actually in the hospital because she's sick.
Speaker B:And he decides to stay that summer and reconnect.
Speaker B:And it's the first time he's been home since he transitioned.
Speaker B:And it's this chance for the family and him to have these, like, conversations and interactions that they haven't had yet.
Speaker B:And it's both surprising and unexpected.
Speaker B:The kinds of, like, encounters that he has with his dad, who's kind of, like, wayward, like him a little lost to, and with this childhood friend who he's always sort of love.
Speaker B:And I think for all these characters, like, one thing that I'm really interested in is, like, how that.
Speaker B:I think I said it before is, like, that feeling of how do I be brave enough to go for the love that I want?
Speaker B:So I think, like, for me, like this, in a way, the journey of the film is kind of paralleling that because it's always kind of just like, striving and fighting to, you know, to get the film made.
Speaker B:And, yeah, that's what Time has done for.
Speaker B:For this project, I feel.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:But at the same time, it's not like you put everything else to the side and we're like, okay, this is it.
Speaker A:This is my sole focus.
Speaker A:And just on the fiction side, when you're working on shorts like an Eno, all the while the feature is slowly coming together.
Speaker A:How do you give your full attention to both?
Speaker A:Is it about polishing your craft until you get to the feature, telling stories you might not get to explore in feature length?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And of course, all the while, not only Friend is summer, but other shorts inform and shape what then the feature becomes?
Speaker B: hat's been amazing that since: Speaker B:And I think for me, it is Always about being able to practice like directing and to get better at my craft.
Speaker B:And I think, yeah, it's been a thing where I think it's just more of this idea of being able to lear learn and, and that's always something that I'm seeking out.
Speaker B:And so I do, I. I feel like the only way I've been able to make my short films is through these fellowships like through Film Dependence Project involved through AFI dww.
Speaker B:They've been these amazing kind of like incubators for other ideas that I want to turn into larger things.
Speaker B:And you know, and that's also how I found collaborators like Stephanie Adam Santos, who is my co writer on Anino.
Speaker B:The first short film that I, that I didn't write was her script.
Speaker B:And you know, it was a beautiful one.
Speaker B:And it's been a way to find like minded spirits and like creatives who just have been like inspiring and you know, teaching me, like opening new worlds for me as well.
Speaker B:So it's been really nice to have that happening in parallel as I make, you know, as I have been working on this bigger thing.
Speaker B:It's been good to be busy in a way.
Speaker A:And now that you mention Stephanie, how deliberate a choice bringing on a writing partner was, was it something you set out, something that happened more organically?
Speaker B:I've always been curious about working with another writer because for me I, as a director I feel like my strong suit is very much the visual and in production and being very like very present during and all the research.
Speaker B:And I love, I respect the words and writers so much that I'm like, I don't think I'm as good of a writer.
Speaker B:So I want to be able to have another collaborator that is, you know, just that we're being able to like pull from each other and hopefully inspire one another to, to, to make something.
Speaker B:And so the writing process, like to find another writer has been this gift.
Speaker B:Like she's been a gift that I've been able to work with and, but also as in terms of friendship, confide in and yeah, it's been amazing to have a writer.
Speaker B:I think that just sometimes, you know, you, you want to be exploring with people.
Speaker B:Like I don't like traveling alone.
Speaker B:I love traveling with others kind of thing for sure.
Speaker A:And yeah, even though they are like minded spirits, they're just not even too similar.
Speaker B:No.
Speaker B:And we're so different.
Speaker A:So when you're sharing authorship, what does maintaining your own voice while making room for hers actually look like in practice?
Speaker B:I mean, when we're writing Together it's something where, you know, we will take different scenes and we'll work on it separately and then we'll come back and work on it together.
Speaker B:And I mean, it was such a great thing to be able to work on the Nino because then it was, you know, the day before we had to shoot the final scene with the grandmothers and mar.
Speaker B:And like we did the rehearsal, it felt like something was missing.
Speaker B:And you know, at like 11pm I was like, steph, we gotta figure this out.
Speaker B:And it was.
Speaker B:We barely slept that night.
Speaker B:Just trying to figure out like, okay, what, like why, like what is, what is this?
Speaker B:What is missing in the scene and actually being able to like speak in our characters voices and kind of be like, okay, what is it?
Speaker B:Like, how do we get there?
Speaker B:And I think that's been a really amazing collaboration to have, is someone that you can be able to like springboard ideas from, but also like constantly fraud at the work and try to get to something to something else because I think that's something, you know, we can.
Speaker B:What's nice is that we're.
Speaker B:We're trying to always push the idea or the, the scenes or the drama more.
Speaker B:And I think it's nice to have somebody there that you can like two brains and two.
Speaker B:Two hearts kind of, you know, in.
Speaker B:In dialog is so much more powerful, especially when it's about, you know, finding like some kind of revelation or discovery that you're trying to seek from another person.
Speaker B:Because that's kind of.
Speaker B:That scene is like this young girl expressing finally her frustration and then her grandparent, her grandmother seeing her and, and meeting her with honesty, which they haven't been.
Speaker B:And I think that was something that we really had to.
Speaker B:We really had to seek out and figure out.
Speaker B:Okay, what, what does that mean?
Speaker B:What does that actually look like to make it feel.
Speaker B:To make it feel like we've gotten to some kind of peak with it, with the drama, with their drama.
Speaker A:To talk specifics.
Speaker A:Something I already pointed out in our earlier conversation is how much the title card has stuck with me, thanks to the fact that despite any no meaning shadow, it looks like this.
Speaker A:How do I call it?
Speaker A:Waving inferno, almost alive with movement, heat, etc.
Speaker A:So, yeah, what are the conversations around creating that visual contradiction between the word's meaning and how it appears on screen and how that might later on reflect on or complement each other with the visual vocabulary you later on developed with cinematographer Tela de Castro.
Speaker B:Yeah, so, you know, in the title card that was assigned by my niece, Maya Caitlin, Orfeh in the Philippines, she had this, you know, I was like, oh, I want to make something special.
Speaker B:I want to do something with the.
Speaker B:That makes it feel ghostly.
Speaker B:And I think it was really hard.
Speaker B:That was like, oh, what about red?
Speaker B:And combining Filipino by buying, which is like, Filipino text with, you know, this eno in English and customizing it, because that's kind of the identity of Marta, even.
Speaker B:And then with my other designer, who was like, we should actually show what this looks like that we're combining it.
Speaker B:And so that's why we have that second title card that shows Anino in two different texts.
Speaker B:And then the translation, which is shadow, which introduces us, which is hopefully gearing us up to kind of feel like, oh, this might be a monster film.
Speaker B:Because Anino is alluded to all the time as monster and in the script, but then also, like, further developing the language with Tehila, it was this idea of, what if it's shadow?
Speaker B:But Marta.
Speaker B:All of these things are happening during the day with Marta.
Speaker B:And what about if we have, like, the way that Nino is signaling to her is through light, is through these flashes of, you know, light that kind of comes into her room and.
Speaker B:And, you know, when she's in the forest and she's kind of enthralled by that moment.
Speaker B:And that was really important because it was like, this light is going to be this portal for her.
Speaker B:We just thought it would be within this story.
Speaker B:It just made so much sense that, like, darkness and light are kind of these two things that, you know, together makes.
Speaker B:Gives us this bigger kind of power alone.
Speaker B:It's, you know, it doesn't quite hit, I suppose.
Speaker B:And so that's.
Speaker B:That was our reasoning behind just trying to design it in a way where we can really.
Speaker B:We can really visualize what that's going to look like.
Speaker B:And so it was.
Speaker B:And using only, you know, what we had, the nature that we had around us, which was, you know, we shot this in a forest somewhere.
Speaker B:And so it was, let's get some really nice light coming through leaves and through.
Speaker B:Through these big trees.
Speaker B:And then, you know, does live in.
Speaker B:Our monster lives and hides in these trees.
Speaker B:And so that's why she has, like, you know, this sort of attachment to that one tree that she hugs a lot as well.
Speaker B:It's like where her and her mom would hang out.
Speaker A:Now that you're on the verge of Anino making its debut on the festival circuit, all the while building toward burning, well, becoming your first feature.
Speaker A:When you think about where you want to go as a Filmmaker.
Speaker A:How the, if there is one ideal path might be what does professional and personal success actually look like to you?
Speaker B:I think being able to make films is.
Speaker B:Will always be professional and personal success.
Speaker B:I feel like in terms of what a career looks like, I think it's finding ways to make it sustainable.
Speaker B:And that's still something that I think I'm figuring out, my peers are figuring out during this time, this crazy, weird time in this industry.
Speaker B:But I think that it's been something where, yeah, it's being able to make things with my friends and being able to explore.
Speaker B:I think that's so important to me is that I'm able to just not stick to one genre.
Speaker B:So that's why it was really important to make a nino that was more supernatural, that had more, you know, action or had this genre element to it.
Speaker B:Because I'd made a couple of things that were, you know, more intimate, more realist and more steeped in drama.
Speaker B:And I think that, you know, I'm always interested in being able to infuse and melt like some of all the things that I love about different kinds of films.
Speaker B:And that's really important, I think is just to be able to explore and play.
Speaker B:And I think I'll always be interested in the romance or like, you know, what love is.
Speaker B:And so it's like, let me, let me do that in multiple genres.
Speaker B:And if I can find ways of just being able to play with different forms, different artists and if we're able to say something a little bit different about love or say something new or just continue to dig at what does it mean to endure, what does it mean to love?
Speaker B:As a Filipino or as somebody coming from here or someone who is non binary or trans, I think that's really important because we need those things.
Speaker B:I think it's.
Speaker B:Film is such a portal to possibility and I think that's why, you know, it's also this thing that gets censored a lot because it's so dangerous, because.
Speaker A:It'S so powerful and it's such a strong note to end on.
Speaker A:So, MG once again, thank you so much for your time, Aaron.
Speaker A:Thank you for letting me dive into your filmography.
Speaker A:And yeah, I can't wait for Burning.
Speaker B:Well, thank you so much.
Speaker B:Thank you for having me.
