Supposedly made for $7,000, Cavite exemplifies the guerilla possibilities of new digital technology, while reconciling the divergent energies of exploitation and socially informed cinema. Released under the banner Truly Indie, it puts to shame Robert Rodriguezs original no-budget DIY El Mariachi with a ruggedly intelligent charge.

Though firestarting with a frenzied, dimly lit montage that anticipates frenzied narrative dislocation, Cavite quickly winds itself up into a minimalist, real-time, what would you do? mind fuck. Depressed, jilted San Diego nightwatchman Adam (played by Gamazon) lands in Manila to visit family, but instead discovers in his luggage an unknown ringing cell phone and a package with a bundle of eerie photos --- stark images of his bound & gagged mother and sister.

On the other end of the line is the sinister, crystallized voice of a determined unidentified terrorist. This disembodied sadist (who is never physicalized, and for all we know may not even exist) leads Adam on a journey into the most dangerous, poverty stricken regions of the Philippines, insistently demanding on a series of Fear Factor style tasks. What emerges is a grimly unresolved critique on the modern Christian-Islamic holy war, and the ways in which, in the face of U.S. imperialism, jihad can be seen simultaneously as a philosophically groundless excuse or a desperate, determined last resort.

Conceived, produced, and performed entirely by two hungry LA-based filmmakers of Filipino descent (Ian Gamazon & Neil dela Llana), it is not without a bit of the characteristic calling card echoes of recent high-concept Hollywood potboilers like "24" and Cellular. But inevitably it succeeds because its fervent, near aggressive contentment with a scrappy nuts and bolts aesthetic shoots a passionate wound of honesty through any traces of opportunism.

The knee-jerk restrictions of DIY filmmaking seem to have saved the filmmakers from themselves. The original idea was to set the film in SoCal with a professional actress in the lead. The last minute decision to shove the obviously uncomfortable, sweaty, out-of-shape Gamazon before the lens and then macguffin the hostage mechanics in favor of stranger in a strange land direct cinema, places the terrorist thriller in the same league as Haskell Wexlers once renegade, now classic Medium Cool.

That film about a news cameraman (played by Robert Forester) caught in the middle of the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, is linked to Cavite not only in its immediate altercation of documentary, tragic drama, and genre kicks, but also in its morally conscious fervor.


U-N-M-A-R-K-E-D Grade:  B +

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