COLD MOUNTAIN CINEMA

Cinema Leonardo, where last Saturday's Club .MOV held its Baguio screening, is really a room in Khavn's family's sprawling Baguio house, made over to simulate what had been the home of Club .MOV all these months, the prematurely late and much lamented Mogwai Cinematheque. And the cummulative mood of the three films we showed (Johnnie To's Sparrow, Ishmael Bernal's Salawahan and Jan Svankmajer's Alice) helped crank the party atmosphere, already spilling over, such as it was, from the previous night's Folk U gig at Cafe by the Ruins. There were copious amounts of free drink and food downstairs, a miniature bonfire and fog rolling in outside and the air was so cold you had no choice but to tank up on alcohol and layer yourself and snuggle up to someone to ward off hypothermia. Which is to say the conditions were, not to exaggerate, perfect. The turnout was sizable and intimate but I missed Oggs and Chard and Don and Kamy and my two perpetual filmmaking cohorts Allan and Gym.

Apart from that, it was possibly the best Club .MOV screening we've had. I'd have thought nothing could top Friday's drunken sojourn to Baguio Country Sounds & Variety Songs,to watch the best band in the world Knights 'Til Dawn, as the undisputed height of the Baguio trip but . . .no wait, not even this could top that.

*Photographs by Minnie Torres (above) and Mabie Alagbate (below).