PLEASE KEEP THIS COPY

PLEASE KEEP THIS COPY
by Miguel Lorenzo Peralta

6 MINUTES, 30 SECONDS | Experimental Documentary

CAST
Class of M2017, Teachers of M2017

PRODUCTION
DIRECTOR/SCREENPLAY/CINEMATOGRAPHER/PRODUCTION DESIGN/EDITOR/SOUND DESIGN/EXECUTIVE PRODUCER/PRODUCER – Miguel Lorenzo Peralta
SOUND DESIGN – Enzo Pisig, Poch Querijero

LOGLINE
Across a white void, old pages come to life and speak. A cacophony of archival voices of rebellious youth in a private all-boys Catholic high school during a moment of political turmoil breaks through, seeking liberation as lines break out of formation and colored ink spills out of the pages.

SYNOPSIS
Across a white void, old documents and mementos appear, telling the story of a recent past. During a moment of great political change and violence in the country, a rowdy class of high school students growing up in an elite private all-boys Catholic school attempt to navigate systems of influence and control. They do what teenagers do when told what to do: they try to make their own fun, and find their own voice in the process.

FILMMAKER’S PROFILE

“MIKO” MIGUEL LORENZO PERALTA is an independent filmmaker from the University of the Philippines Film Institute, who works as a freelance film and video editor, sound designer, and musical scorer. His interests in creating experimental documentary films stem from a desire to explore memory, history, and identity through the use of personal archives, both physical and digital, playing with its form, while also having a distinct approach to sound design. He participated in a Southeast Asian creative documentary storytelling workshop, AsiaDoc, organized by Forum Film Dokumenter and Docmonde-France, to develop a project on his personal experiences and reflections on flooding in Marikina. He has also worked as editor, musical scorer and sound designer for numerous short film projects, including several online digital theatre productions for the Ateneo de Manila University.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Growing up in an all-boys Catholic school in a predominantly Catholic country, my high school experience felt like a constant push and pull between who I “should” be and who I wanted to be. Amidst the already chaotic environment of having boys growing up together, dealing with puberty, and the juvenile antics that ensue, there was always an underlying tension in the classroom as they taught us rowdy boys what it meant to become men, who must dress accordingly and behave like men. Meanwhile, outside the classroom, the ultimate masculine father figure in the country who burst through the scene slowly rose to power, started his violent drug war against the poor and marginalized, and gave a dictator a hero’s burial. I both cherish and despise my High School memories, and yet for some reason, I kept so much of it, in the form of old documents, ripped pages from notepads, doodles, even small trinkets from that time: a piece of a drumstick, an origami heart, an entrance exam permit. That yellow piece of paper that served as my entrance ticket to the school and gave my identity a designated number told me to please keep this copy, and so I did, and more. It has been a few years since then, and looking back at this rich archive that my younger self built, I could feel the same tension I felt all those years ago imbued inside all the items and documents I kept. I could almost feel my own story of wrestling with my identity as a queer person and learning what it means to “grow up” bursting through these old, dry, and wrinkly pages. This film is a literal product of its time, made up of all these bits and pieces that I kept to rebuild the past. I learned early on to keep this copy: to remember the struggle, but also to remember how much we, the students, pushed back with all our strong-willed youthful energy, and found our own means of liberation. They gave us lines to follow and boxes to fill in, and yet we decided to draw whatever we wanted. To remember is to resist.