We Still Have to Close Our Eyes (John Torres, 2019) (Patreon)

Among the various directors of the Filipino New Wave, John Torres (Todo todo teros, Lukas the Strange) has always been one of the strangest and most original. This newest work is long on concept but comes up short on delivery, feeling like a sketch for something that Torres might choose to more fully realize at a later date. The visual material is taken from documentary / behind the scenes footage shot on other directors' film sets, including Lav Diaz and Erik Matti. You would not necessarily know this, but it explains both the high production values and the fact that nothing we're witnessing feels quite "right."

Cutting this footage together, Torres then using text alone to generate an outlandish, futuristic cyber-narrative about an app that uses real people's bodies as avatars, taking over their will (which it appears that they have relinquished by choice) and forcing them to commit whatever acts the app operator wants. This is amusing up to a point -- Torres is really just describing production assistants -- but the story goes nowhere, and doesn't have time to develop. Plus, there is no real connection between what we're seeing and what we're reading. So in effect, We Still Have to Close Our Eyes is an experiment that simply didn't work. It happens.