Dawn is breaking over a fisherman’s boat, gently rocked by the waves of the sleeping ocean. From the very first sequence, Leonor Noivo sets up her patient and watchful pace in long shots that capture the pulse of life. While “Filipinas”, the Filipino domestic workers, have already been portrayed in various films that show their working conditions abroad—in Europe and in the Middle East—Leonor Noivo’s first feature film looks at them from the Philippines. And keeping in mind the legacy of Spanish colonization. Always attentive to both the landscape and the people, Bulakna gives each character enough space to exist, and paints a complex, nuanced portrait of the country, focusing on the sweet air and faces, the present moment stretched out in a vaporous atmosphere, and the rain and gray sky shutting the horizon. Through the daily routine based on subsistence—fishing, preparing fish, selling it—conversations unfold, revealing reasons for leaving or staying, the attachment to the country and to loved ones, and the opportunities lying elsewhere. What are the promises made to a youth that nonetheless appreciates the value of this ordinary life, and of the traditions and knowledge that are woven into it? What dreams are smothered by the cruel reality abroad—the loneliness, the hard work, no private life? How and why would they come back? Leonor Noivo weaves several threads and intertwines several registers in her wide-ranging and generous film. Thus, far from a purely observational logic, Bulakna features staged sequences in which the resistance to the arrival of the settlers is performed, and the bodies rise up in beautiful portraits, like so many face-to-face games with the camera. In a lucid and sensitive way, Leonor Noivo turns the Philippines into the heart of a globalized world and its laws, while giving these women the opportunity to tell their own stories and to counter this logic with their own paths to emancipation.
Claire Lasolle