Behind the scenes with Dustin Celestino
In 2023, filmmaker Dustin Celestino wrote and directed “Ang Duyan ng Magiting” for that year’s Cinemalaya film festival, which won the Special Jury Prize and was nominated for seven Gawad Urian awards, including Best Picture. The script won the Palanca back in 2019 as a play before it was turned into a film, and highlighted a directorial aesthetic of theatrical narratives, told in a cinematic way.
The politically-charged film showcased much of Celestino’s anger at what he saw in our country’s political climate. This year, he returns to Cinemalaya with “Habang Nilalamon ng Hydra ang Kasaysayan,” another film that delves into politics.
A work of (non-)fiction
Utilizing an unconventional narrative and filmic style, the film “Habang Nilalamon ng Hydra ang Kasaysayan” is about four characters who navigate a political climate where truth has lost its power and history is being rewritten—disappearing, even, with growing disinformation campaigns and changing social norms.
It’s a cerebral piece, an intelligent work that portrays a philosophical argument through a story rather than an organic, grounded exploration of this loss. While the film states at its opening that it is a work of fiction and that the events and people are not based on anyone in reality, from the first five minutes of the film’s opening, we already know that this was heavily inspired by the 2022 election.
What Celestino does is to take four characters—intelligent and articulate—and situate them in intimate scenes where they can really discuss their emotions and feelings about that election. While it gives Celestino permission to intellectualize and really sink his teeth into that moment, as a work of art, it reveals brushstrokes for everyone to see.
“Ang Duyan ng Magiting” vs “Habang Nilalamon ng Hydra ang Kasaysayan”
When I ask him about the relationship between his two recent Cinemalaya entries, he says: “The attempt in ‘[Ang] Duyan ng Magiting’ is to tell the story of a nation in 13 scenes. This one is to expand a certain feeling. How do I sustain a feeling throughout the length of an entire film? And how do I reinterpret that feeling with different perspectives?”
That feeling is his feeling of loss over the 2022 election results and is explored fully in the film “Habang Nilalamon ng Hydra ang Kasaysayan,” nicknamed “Hydra” for short.
“I’m experimenting with different narrative structures,” he says about both films’ theatrical narrative structures. “‘Duyan [ng Magiting]’ is a daisy chain; it’s cause and effect. It’s about what happens when somebody does this. The narrative style is part of the message. In Duyan, it starts with a professor and a rant, and it snowballs from there.”
“In Hydra, it is different because it is impressionistic. I was trying out this idea, ‘What if I wrote something like it was a rainbow?’” he muses. “The first character starts the story in the first chapter, and it ends in the 8th chapter, and then, the second character starts their story in chapter two and ends in chapter seven.”
In his press kit, he calls this the “Symphonic Arc structure,” attributing these experiments to his love of novels. “I like utilizing structures I pick up from novels,” he adds. “I like how it makes me feel.” As he explains it to me, I immediately think of the David Mitchell novel Cloud Atlas, which also has the same structure. When I tell him this, he nods his head and smiles in shared understanding.
“It’s an experiment,” he continues. “I don’t know kung na-gets ng mga tao, but there’s something to it that feels really new. And that’s what I like. I want to explore new ways to tell stories.”
Nothing means anything unless there’s hope
While there are a lot of people who find his work exciting, there are also those who feel a little put off by his unconventional style of filmmaking. There’s a craft involved, a technique, that can make his work distant from the casual movie-goer, or pretentious, from some cinephiles. But what it does is it gives Celestino a chance to really rationalize and reconcile these big ideas in his head that he really wants to tackle.
“It’s how I think,” he shares. “In terms of structure, I like to work on something I can draw and something that I can explain. I always believe that the way we make our films, the way that I write my script, should be part of the form—should be part of the content. Form is content. If the device is not necessary, nagpa-cute lang ako. For me to justify the structures that I use… that I implement, they have to be intrinsically connected to the story.”
And this was a story that Celestino felt very close to. Over the past few years, Celestino admits to having been depressed, struggling with his mental health, and incapable of finding joy in things. He realized later on that it was the absence of hope that was the cause of all of this, and so it was important to leave a sense of that positivity into “Habang Nilalamon ng Hydra ang Kasaysayan.”
“We have to create meaning from belief, from hope—that what we do matters,” he explains. “Without that belief, it becomes empty. Nothing means anything unless there’s hope. That’s where it begins. That’s what we wanted the movie to be about.”
When asked about whether he was worried that the film was too smart or too “elitist” with all its open analogy to Greek mythology, he shares that it wasn’t a consideration at all. “Movies like this don’t usually make blockbuster numbers,” he says, laughing. “It’s for a niche market, but we believed that it was really important to tell people who previously believed in ideals from 2022 to regain their hope.”
“It’s a love letter to the Kakampinks, and I say that without shame or hesitation,” he continues. “It was for my friends, for my wife. A lot of the people in the production gave us major discounts because they believed in what we wanted to do.”
He finishes, “Let’s make a film that we love. At the end of the day, none of us is going to be millionaires or billionaires because we made a movie. If I wanted to be a billionaire, I wouldn’t be a filmmaker. There are so many ways to earn money. But when we make movies with our friends, it’s rarely about that. It’s what gives us reason to live. We feel fulfilled [doing what we do].”
