Paris sales agent picks up Rotterdam-winning PH film

Filipino filmmaker Shireen Seno was “thrilled” to win the Netpac prize at the recent 47th Rotterdam International Film Festival for “Nervous Translation.”

“It was a wonderful surprise and a huge honor,” she recounted. To be invited to Rotterdam’s Hivos Tiger tilt was cause for celebration in itself, so winning was a delightful bonus.

She recalled that the first time the country had competed at the Rotterdam fest was with John Torres’ “Years When I Was a Child Outside.” Torres is also the producer of “Nervous Translation.”

‘Remarkable talent’

Seno told the Inquirer that the Paris-based sales agent Reel Suspects had acquired her film, an entry in last year’s Cinema One fest.

According to Screen International, Reel Suspects’ Matteo Lovadina commended Seno’s “remarkable talent,” which captures a “narrow and magical universe, threatened by incomprehensible adults.”

He noted that the film was “an exceptional and pleasant experience for the audience.”
He asserted: “In very rare occasions, we’ve seen this pure innocence and candidness of childhood so well-portrayed onscreen.”

Lovadina expressed the hope that “festival directors and buyers will have the time to sit down and breathe, to enjoy the lightness of this masterpiece.”

Seno told website De Filmkrant that her films revolve around “the pressure of growing up.”

She is now working on her next movie, “The Wild Duck,” “a series of vignettes on a middle-aged Filipino migrant who stumbles on a bird’s nest in his backyard in suburban Los Angeles.”—BAYANI SAN DIEGO JR.