Todo Todo Teros

TODO, TODO, TEROS is, simply put, a lovely film. Part video collage of found footage, glued together with bits of poetry; part espionage drama; part documentary look on the Manila of today (the sights, sounds, feel of it, the excitement, energy, jacked-up paranoia); part meditation on relationships and the impact one has on others, the film is by turns funny, disturbing, tender, erotic. On the surface it’s the story of a terrorist-filmmaker (Earl Drilon, as the director’s surrogate) walking through the Manila of today, a Manila just a shade darker, less tolerant of marginal figures and eccentrics and wayward types, thanks to 9/11 – we have to remember that Al Qaeda operatives have been captured in Manila. Torres doesn’t overplay the terrorism angle (he doesn’t have the budget to, anyway); he keeps it all at a background murmur, and it helps add to the verisimilitude, to the sense that this – this is Manila in the second millennium. But the film’s true core – its secret heart, if you like – are a series of extended interviews of one Olga, a beautiful Russian guide with warm eyes and wide smile who has apparently fallen in love with the terrorist. (Noel Vera)