A Programmer's Chronicles, April 2006


DVD shop in Quiapo, Manila (Philippines)


by Gertjan Zuilhof

For this piece I went looking for a picture of an illegal DVD shop. Pirated DVDs, in other words. I had the picture in my head and that's always a disadvantage when you are looking. I found eloquent images, for instance of a Hungarian plain with shattered DVDs and a steam roller still rolling all over them. Or the photo of a DVD seller on a street corner in Beijing who had put his tiny box of warez on a stool. That was more or less the complete opposite of what I had in mind.

In Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and above all in Manila, I had seen pirate DVD shops that were larger and with a wider range than legal stores in Amsterdam or New York. And that's what I wanted. An audience seeking calmly and choosing from immense stocks. The new model of cinephilia. The school of the young Asian film makers.

Apparently the DVD pirates do not like having their picture taken even though their trade is tolerated in a country like the Philippines just as marijuana is tolerated in Holland. I write an e-mail to the young Filipina film maker Janus Victoria. Together with the daughter of the director of the Cinemanila Film Festival, she had given me a guided tour of Quiapo, a famous and notorious district around the ruins of a cathedral in Manila where an unimaginable and chaotic number of pirate shops can be found.

Janus didn't have a photo in stock, but next morning (hurray for the time difference) she sent me a picture she had taken specially. Not entirely without risk. The district had been raided by the police only a week earlier. Marijuana plantations are dismantled in Amsterdam attics from time to time too. The traders were nervous and distrustful. She looked for a dealer to have a chat with and let him take a picture of her. And then she made the attached photograph, which of course doesn’t show anything especially exciting. Large DVD boxes are on display on pretty kitchen tablecloths. But just imagine that in the background, rapidly fading from sight in the dusk, dozens more shops are to be found and this goes on down many streets. Many of the same brand new mainstream, but also boxes with Asian and American classics. For tourists the prices are incredibly low (less than the euro per DVD), but Filipino lovers film others also put together large collections.

On my first visit to Asia, I was still surprised about the cinema-loving erudition of filmmakers, especially the young, but by now I have more awareness of the enormous circulation of films on DVD (or VCD, the cheap variation without extras) in this region.
The pirate DVD shop could prove to be a model for the love of film in the near future. Also in our future. And possibly it is not even a particularly pessimistic picture. I have played with the idea of putting together a complete and functional pirate shop at the festival. But the BREIN Foundation (The foundation responsible for protecting the rights of the entertainment industry in the Netherlands) will not see the funny side.

You don’t have to be a futurologist or a clairvoyant to see that film screening in theatres is about to change drastically. Because it is already changing. And we are all joining in. We sell our films on DVD and we offer them streaming on Internet (Tigeronline.nl, for Dutch viewers only). Analogous to the CD/music industry, this phenomenon will grow and speed up. Not long ago, illegally downloading music was something for nerdy secondary-school kids. Now every postman can fill up his iPod legally. We can expect exactly the same with films.

Imagine a new Wong Kar-wai being premiered in May in Cannes. In that same month, it can be downloaded via the FNAC or you can order it through a voucher in the daily paper when you take a trial subscription. By January, our audience will already have seen the film. They are still interested in Wong Kar-wai, they may want to see him in the flesh, but we don’t need to show the film any more.

We can only speculate about how developments like this will go and I would like to do that in a playful and rather provocative way. The train of thought will be: why do you do when there’s no point in screening films in an auditorium any more? (Once upon a time you could listen to a gramophone record in an auditorium, but we can’t imagine that any more in this MP3 era.) You could put this into the form of a What-is-Cinema-like debate again, but I propose trying it once in a more concrete, humorous and maybe even more practical way. By starting off by inventing the festival of the future.
To put it simply, a festival has two foundations: one is screening a film in an auditorium, two is bringing together people who make films or love films. So in the festival of the future, this will come down to “what you do to bring people together if screening films is no longer relevant”.

Small independent producers and film makers who produce and distribute their own films in particular need an opportunity to offer for sale DVDs of their previous work, but often also of their new work. Various film makers tried this through festival channels this year, but a merchandising shop with festival T-shirts is not really suitable for this. We could help our film makers with our own “pirate shop” and I think the audience would like it too. You could display special films and ones difficult to find in a shop for the potentially most interested audience there is.

I’ll give one example. Miklós Ács, a very unjustly forgotten avant-garde film maker from Hungary, at the screening of his almost impossible to find cult film Sön és Grósz (Nice and Big, 1988), sold not only the DVD of this film but also the DVD of his latest film Shocking, which is only being premiered at a Hungarian festival in a couple of months time. When I asked him whether this was not going to cause a première problem, he said he thought it was more important that people have an opportunity to see his work. There you are. The festival of the future.