Here’s a ‘Trap’ worth running into

By Dan Bloom

Danny Bloom
Danny Bloom

CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — I live on a crowded, subtropical island in the Western Pacific, on the opposite side of the “Pacific Pond” from readers in San Diego. And just south of Taiwan is the Philippines. We are neighbors. You can fly there in one hour, it’s that close.

So when Typhoon Haiyan hit Tacloban City in the Philippines in November 2013, we could feel the rain and wind here in Taiwan, too, although the storm made its direct hit on Tacloban and killed 7,000 people there.

There aren’t many Jewish people in the Philippines, and the Asian nation has been a Catholic country for over 400 years now. People know the Bible, people know Jesus, and people are devout and deeply religious.

So when the well-known Filipino film director Brillante Mendoza decided to make a feature film about the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan — called ”Typhoon Yolanda” in the Philippines — he used a quote from Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Scriptures to bookend the story: “A time to tear down, and a time to mend.”

Mendoza’s cli-fi movie Trap (called “Taklub” in Tagolog, the national language of the Philippines) was set up originally as an ”advocacy movie” financed by the government of the Philippines to help raise awareness of typhoon readiness and the resilience of the Filipino people. The carefully-crafted 90-minute feature has film already been shown at the Cannes Film Festival and may be a candidate for an Oscar in the best foreign film category.

It’s that good, it’s that poignant, it’s that brilliant. Mendoza is a film director who is well-known in Asia, but while Trap is a powerful climate-themed movie with a great cast and helmed by a savvy director, whether the movie will catch on among arthouse fans in Europe and America is hard to say.

Trap is a quiet, slow-moving, thoughtful piece of international cinema that has already been nominated for best picture in the annual Cli Fi Movie Awards for 2015, with the winners to be announced a week before the Oscars telecast in early 2016. It stars the famous Filipina actress Nora Aunor, and for her performance alone, the film is worth the price of admission.

For me, Trap is a powerful piece of cli-fi storytelling that is about an almost unspeakable tragedy following the lives of a group of typhoon survivors trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. At at the same time Mendoza says after the tears and mourning, it’s time to mend the country and get things right again. And prepare for the next big storm as well.

Maggie Lee, reviewing the movie for Variety magazine in Hollywood, gave the film a thumbs up, noting: ”Much of the story is filmed to create the effect of a hand-held camera in the style of a documentary, creating a sense of gritty intimacy.”

But Trap is not a documentary. It’s pure fiction, pure cinema, pure magic. Can it help to raise awareness about global warming and climate change in the Philippines and worldwide?

Mendoza set out to make a touching local movie for audiences in the Philippines first, but he has succeeded in creating a piece of art that transcends borders now and has a global tale to tell.

Trap is consistent with the Jewish concept  of “tikkun olam” (to repair the world).It’s well worth seeing if it comes your way.

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Bloom, based in Taiwan, is an inveterate web surfer and a climate activist.  You may comment to him at dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com, or post your comment on this website provided that the rules below are observed.

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