Camera Obscura

A cardboard box with a pinhole in one end and a sheet of vellum on the backside, so that the sun fluttering among the trees is projected onto it. This moving image edit is derived from about 4 or 5 takes on the day venus was to cross the sun's path. As it turned out I got the day wrong, but it wouldn't have mattered as the image that formed on the vellum was so soft and wispish and the trees were in the way that there was no chance whatsoever venus could be seen passing by.

As a police officer investigates the gruesome murder of her colleague, she discovers that a mysterious supernatural force is behind it.

A writer haunted by the death of his wife and threatened by the imagined infidelities of his lovers uses his affairs for the subjects of his novels.

The title “Kamera Obskura” is a Filipino spelling of the latin “Camera Obscura” which simply means “dark room”. The film’s concept adheres to formalist cinema, where the filmmaker’s thesis is to make a semblance of a vintage film seemingly produced sometime in the late 1920s to early 1930s in the Philippines. The thesis is to conjure up a film from a period that did not really exist in Philippine cinema’s historical cultural heritage as we know it, such as a pseudo-expressionist / experimental Filipino cinema of the silent film era. It is a film within a film. The narrative plays with the idea of a retro-futurist world where a prisoner locked away in a dark chamber for over two decades only sees the reality of the world outside through the small hole in his cell, which projects an image of the city on his wall, the phenomenon of the “camera obscura”.