While I guess I’d admit having sort of a soft spot in my heart for bilingual no-budget terrorism thrillers, I do not think that was any prerequisite to enjoying the hell out of Ian Gamazon and Neill Dela Llana’s gritty film Cavite, which opens today at Cinema Village. Shot on video and costing whatever the going rate is for a flight to Manila, the film follows a young Filipino-American from his dead-end job (and impending fatherhood) in the States to his father’s funeral in the Philippines. No sooner does Adam (Gamazon) arrive than he is on the receiving end of a cell phone call threatening to kill his kidnapped mother and sister.
But while anonymous, the caller is hardly part of a random plot, and its brisk momentum plunges Adam into slums where an increasing social desperation reflects and eventually overtakes his own proscribed fear. And as Cavite–with its squalid authenticity and a percussive score so minimalist it is barely there–rockets toward its climax, the suspense falls away to reveal the raw roots of extremism. That said, nothing about Cavite feels excessively didactic (as opposed to, say, Michael Winterbottom’s egregious verite-terror meditation The Road to Guantanamo), an asset that only bolsters the film’s resonance.
But the filmmakers’ achievement is arguably more apparent in their adaptability. After all, Dela Llana and Gamazon wore virtually every hat in their Philippines locations, all the way down to Gamazon carting around sound equipment in his bag. “We knew that to go to the Philippines, we couldn’t have a very big crew or too many people with us for logistical and for budgetary reasons,” Dela Llana told me last week. “I mean, with a one-character film, we thought, ‘Yeah–this can be done with two people.’ We were going to have to work around sound and camera and all that, but we knew it was possible.”
Gamazon assumed the lead role after a year of auditioning actresses, none of whom felt especially comfortable with the prospect of traveling to Asia with two strangers to shoot for no pay. The pair filmed restlessly around Manila during the day and crashed with Dela Llana’s relatives at night. The pure foreignness of the environment comes through in every shot, with Gamazon–who had not visited the Philippines since his childhood–seeing this world for the first time with the same Western helplessness as his and Dela Llana’s viewers.
The conditions evident onscreen are the same ones to which many observers attribute the rise of Filipino terror groups like Abu Sayyaf, and the filmmakers specifically wanted to address the issue when they developed the script. “When the seed of the idea came up with the cell phone call between Ian and myself, basically it was just an action movie.” Dela Llana said. “But once we decided to set it in the Philippines, Ian and I knew during the writing process that we could make this really topical. Especially after 9/11; this is literally weeks after 9/11 that the ideas started to come together. Originally, it wasn’t supposed to be a political film, but it just kind of layered itself into the story.”
“We’re very apolitical people,” Gamazon added. “But at the same time, we knew while filming in the Philippines that this had to be a political film.”
“It was an option that would make the film a lot more layered and give it a lot more dimension,” Dela Llana said, “as opposed to just a generic action film like a Phone Booth or a Cellular.”
Cavite made a festival splash right away, premiering at Rotterdam before moving onto South by Southwest and the Los Angeles Film Festival. The distribution hunt was notably slower, with Gamazon and Dela Llana exercising months’ worth of patience before locking in fabled producer rep John Pierson as their distribution point man. “John e-mailed, and basically he said, ‘We have to talk,’ ” Dela Llana told me. “And John was at the University of Texas in Austin teaching a film producing class, and he wanted us to turn Cavite into a class project, where he would teach his class hands-on experience on how to get a film out there through marketing, through publicity, how to get distributors into screenings–it basically became a huge class project for him. At the same time, he really took the lead in getting the film out.”
They eventually landed with Truly Indie, sort of a pay-to-play distribution arm of 2929 Entertainment that handles a film’s one-week theatrical release, publicity and advertising for a flat fee. In return, the filmmakers retain the rights to their work and can choose another theatrical and/or video distributor if a successful run attracts potential buyers–which I am certain will materialize. I mean, just watch the movie; you will not find any fear and not a single excuse. These guys can do anything.

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