The National Commission on Culture and the Arts has a new chairperson, Dr. Rene R. Escalante, following Nick Lizaso’s premature resignation in June.
Escalante is actually just serving out Lizaso’s term till December, though the NCCA board can elect him to a full term.
Concurrently the chairperson of the National Historical Commission, Escalante is continuing the NCCA projects during Lizaso’s term.
One such project is the Sine Halaga Film Festival and Educational Resources. It was launched only in August 2021.
Also known as the NCCA Filipino Values Film Festival, it aims to depict one or more of 20 Filipino values identified in a National Study on Filipino Values, which Dr. Arvin Villalon and Jose Soliman Jr. conducted for two years.
The festival’s second year is now being organized by the same group that put up the first one — the Negros Cultural Foundation headed by filmmaker-educator Elvert Bañares.
The NCF on 23 August called for
short-film entries on the festival’s second year. Deadline for submission of entries is on 30 September.
The good news is, there are now two categories: Adults and students. However, there are no subsidies for the entries.
“The first festival is ongoing, which is why we cannot give grants to the eight finalists per category,” said Bañares at a media conference for the festival dubbed the NCCA Filipino Values Film Festival, a platform for filmmakers to tell stories depicting one or more of 20 Filipino values.
The winning entries are shown free for a year on the festival’s website.
In Category A (adult filmmakers), the top three winning films will each receive P100,000 and a Halagahan trophy, while the five finalists will each get P20,000 and a Sine Halaga certificate. Running time for each entry is from five to 15 minutes.
For Category B (students), the top three winning films will each get P50,000 while the five finalists will each receive P10,000 along with a Sine Halaga certificate. Running time for each entry is from five to 10 minutes only.
The NCCA and the NCF will accept entries produced between 1 January 2021 to 30 September 2022.
Deadline for submission of entries is at midnight of 30 September via the official Sine Halaga online submission platform.
Entries, including winners, may be entered later in any other festival here or abroad. One such entry, Zig Dulay’s Black Rainbow, won Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay in the short-film category of the 2022 Cinemalaya Intertantional Film Festival.
It’s about an Aeta boy obsessed to learn how to read the legal documents given to their community and understand why they are being forced to give up their ancestral lands.
Another Sine Halaga winner, Richard Soriano Legazpi’s Bakit Ako Sinusundan ng Buwan, will be screened in one international film festival.
Sine Halaga comes with a component for classroom teaching, which makes it unique from other film fests — a tool to teach Filipino values, Bañares said.
The NCCA holds a series of webinars and prepares study guides to aid teachers in discussing the films with their students.