Interview: Awarded Filipino Director Mendoza presents illegal side of normal family

Brillante Mendoza, Filipino movie director presenting his film "Ma' Rosa" in competition at the ongoing 69th Cannes Film Festival, wanted to explain in the movie the contradictions of an apparently "normal" family.

"I was interested by the idea that you have to exchange or trade off somebody in order for you to have back your freedom," Mendoza told Xinhua in an exclusive interview here in Cannes.

"Four years ago, I met a person, he was one of my acquaintances at that time. He was part of this story and I'm also involved in it," he said.

"Ma' Rosa" tells, in a realistic way, about the contradictions of a family who owns a convenience store in a poor area of Manila.

The shop also sells secretly drugs and this brings the mother Rosa and her husband into a strange commissariat where they will have to negotiate freedom by giving something to the corrupt cops.

Explaining how he approached the story, Mendoza said the advantage was that he already knew this person and it was easy for him to interview the family.

"I tried to get both sides, the one of the family and the one of the police," he added.

"First you need to establish a connection, even the people I interviewed in the past, they could feel if you were just exploiting them or if you wanted to know their real story," Mendoza said.

"I wanted to investigate about reality. Eventually they could trust me and they started telling me even the most delicate secrets," he continued.

The Filipino director wanted to present a family from a different angle.

"The interesting thing is that we have this pre-notion of what a family is and we see it as it is always perceived in our mind, but in real life, it is not like that," he stressed.

"I'm trying to present a family in a different aspect of life, for me you could be bad citizen but you can be a good parent or vice versa," he added.

The Manila based director would like the people to have critical thinking on what is right and what is wrong, because in the film this family is treated like a "commodity".

He also want the audience to reflect about how we perceive the significance of life and family.

According to him, in this case but also similar cases in the Philippines, this is a way to earn a living, a necessity. Mendoza was interested to show how an illegal activity becomes a way of life.

As for his style in directing, he said "About my esthetic, I try to be real as much as I can in term not only of the camera works but also about acting storytelling. I want to capture real life, and there is always in my film a red line between the documentary and a feature film or a fiction."

"Normally, actors know the general story but not the exact details of the story. I like to work in this way, because I want everything to be more spontaneous," he told Xinhua.

"With the screenplay, I'm very collaborative. Then I tried always to be a team player as much as I can, because I have a young team, very aggressive and they always want to learn, to explore and to experiment," he said.

Brillante Mendoza is one of the most prominent forces of the Filipino cinema. He was in competition in Cannes with Serbis in 2008 and Kinatay in 2009, the latter won him Best Director Award. Endit