A SHORT FILM ABOUT THE INDIO NACIONAL

A choir boy torn between his commitments to the Spanish and to his compatriots, a teenager under growing pressure from the revolution, an actor seeking to free himself from his troubled soul: through these characters, in the 1980s, Philippines’ bloody emancipation from Spanish control.

Raya Martin does not appropriate an aesthetic to remix it, he continues it, he obstinately pursues its possible extensions, convinced of their particular powers left fallow. These particular powers, mostly forgotten, are those of the silent image: its frontality, its ghostly poetry, its sound affordances, its editing, more consequent, more “organic”, its brutal representation of reality. They are also those, more known – because surviving – of the black and white. Finally, they are those of an old documentary form, also silent – we spoke a little earlier of Flaherty – made up of fragmentary sketches, islands of situations scattered around the central subject, meant to give an image of the general landscape by the succession of its particularities.

Mathieu Macheret (Critikat.com, 2008)