By Anna Valmero
MANILA CITY, METRO MANILA—For indie film director Jim Libiran, Tondo means more than the dire images of poverty with littered streets and poor families in slums.
Tondo is the country’s breeding ground of promising football players, Libiran says.
“We are a country of basketball players and it’s sad because I think we play football better and we can make it internationally if we have more people playing it,” Libiran tells loQal.ph.
In Tondo, for example, football players since the 1960s have been known as one of the best in the sport and even earned the moniker “barefoot footballers” since they cannot afford to buy shoes.
Without open lots in the area, resident players for decades have practiced in the narrow streets of Tondo and their playground is the dumpsite nearby, referred to as hapilan by residents.
The struggle to rise from the garbage dump and seek victory, says Libiran, is the story of his next indie film “Happyland.”
“Happyland” is Libiran’s follow-up indie film after “Tribu,” which is a docu-fiction about gangsta rappers in Tondo.
But Libiran says “Happyland” tackles the “sunnier side of Tondo and the start of its glorious history in football.”
“Tondo has produced legends in football in the 60s, 70s, 80s and until now. If you were a football player then, you know then legend of the Tondo players, the tough ones who cannot buy shoes so they play football wearing socks or just barefoot. And they were good,” adds Libiran.
The indie film director lamented that the Philippines, after producing a stellar striker in Paulino Alcantara remained to this day a consistent low-performer in the sport and an outsider to the World Cup games.
“In Happyland, it’s an inspiring story and a sad story about all the small legends who played football. We don’t know about them because there is no career in football. We are hoping that somehow we change that like have a good football team ten years from now; we start by teaching and inspiring the young,” says Libiran.
Challenges to producing Happyland aside from generating budget and the need to reshoot major sequences after an editing studio lost major footages shot between January and June this year, included the creative dilemma on the part of Libiran: whether to hire actors to play football or to teach acting to football players or futkaleras , having been members of the Futbol sa Kalye group co-organized by Libiran years ago. He chose the latter.
“Although we started filming in January, the concept for Happyland came in 2007 after we showed Tribu. Based on our experience in Tribu,it is much beneficial for the community to use local actors so we trained them in another form of art aside from the discipline in football,” he explains.
Filming the docu-fiction cost about P12 million, excluding the post production costs. And now that they have to retake major scenes, the cost may go up higher. “We used six red cams because you are shooting football and daily, we have a crew of 100 people to film at the dumpsite.”
But for Libiran, nothing is impossible especially when he is working for a social enterprise project that “will give something back to the community.”
“I am not doing things to help people but I think this is the right thing of doing films. At the situation we are in right now, it is very obscene to observe millions of pesos on a purely entertainment thing. Something has to go back to the community,” says Libiran.
(This story also appears on Yahoo! Philippines here)
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