Pardon filmmaker Carlos Siguion-Reyna if he cannot help getting finicky while watching the digitally restored version of his 1991 film, “Hihintayin Kita sa Langit.”
Richard Gomez (left) and Dawn Zulueta
Pardon filmmaker Carlos Siguion-Reyna if he cannot help getting finicky while watching the digitally restored version of his 1991 film, “Hihintayin Kita sa Langit.”
During the unveiling of the restored film last Feb. 27 at the Glorietta 4 Cinema, a series of “what-could-have-beens” ran rapidly through his mind.
“I saw some missed opportunities,” he later shared with the Inquirer. “I should have used acoustic music, instead of synthesizers. I should have done the film with original sound instead of dubbing afterwards. I should’ve covered that moment from another angle…and so on.”
But then again, he acknowledged that the film is exactly as it should be, presenting a “picture of me at the time.”
“I really wanted to do the story (a takeoff from Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’), with all the scope and intensity of its characters’ passions and cruelty, the themes of love and revenge, even as we emphasized the class politics,” he said.
He described the restoration process as “gratifying.”
“Despite the what-could-have-beens, the film has held up through the years,” he explained. “To me, the tone remains consistent, the characters’ story arcs are clean, the themes are communicated. And Batanes in the wild continues to enchant.”
Ah, Batanes.
It was his second film, and he was “26 years younger and brasher,” he owned up. One of the bravest decisions he had made then was to shoot in Batanes, still unexplored cinematic territory back then.
Carlos Siguion-Reyna
Now, it can be told: Of the film’s 26 shooting days, only five were spent on the country’s northernmost island.
In those days, Philippine Airlines could only land there with small propeller-driven planes, he recounted.
