An amazing thing about films is that they let you travel to places you would normally never get to see. A funeral home in the Philippines, for instance. One such funeral home is run by the eternally irritable Sonya, the lead character in Ode to Nothing directed by Dwein Baltazar, which is competing in the Official Selection section.
It's clear that the ageing Sonya has been on her own for a good long time. She has difficulty communicating with others, be they her bereaved customers or the local street-seller of the yoghurt for which she has developed a taste. She hardly speaks to anyone any more - not even her father. They live together in the same building in whose basement she keeps the corpses. But then Sonya rejects solitude and, although there's nobody at hand to chat with her, the heroine starts up a conversation with one of the corpses.
"Filming with Dwein Baltazar is never dull," says the director's court cameraman, Neil Daza. "We share the same approach to filming: experiment, improvise and learn new things along the way." And experimenting truly happened, mainly in respect of the visual component which is exceptional from the very first scene. To give an example, we watch the action as if through a coffin window with rounded corners. The film's creators originally considered filming Ode to Nothing in black-and-white. "I took a very reserved stance towards that, though. The loss of colour always means you lose an important instrument with which to tell your story," reminisces cameraman Daza.
