When Halina Mitchell is visiting The Philippines, the country of her mother, for the first time from New York, she was expecting to connect with her relatives and with a culture she haven´t had the chance to get to know before. But life offers her a surprise and she is also getting to know Cris, a local film critic, with a cynical yet deep knowlege of the everyday life, including its kitsch.
Halina Filipina, a graphic novel by Filipino artist Arnold Arre was my first ever encounter with this unjustly less known culture and its people. A country with a diverse mosaique of language, pristine natural resources and over 113 million people, proud of their Pinoy identity and over 10 million people diaspora spread all over the world, but hardly known outside the South-Eastern Asian realm.
Definitely, an identity story can be very boring and repetitive, with a frame repeated from a culture to the other. After all, most of the non-´Western´ cultures are precariously known outside their own borders. However, in Halina Filipina there is the story that enfolds following its own rules, taking over the aim of educating and sharing authentic pieces of knowledge.
The identity is created through the connection between Halina and Cris, his funny way of introducing her to words in tagalog and to hilarious kitsch shows. In graphic terms, it mixes the first and second plans, focusing for a long amount of time on visual details, like the movement of the characters, their facial features or surroundings. I will definitely check more works by this artist as he is both talented in terms of storytelling board and creating visual stories.
For anyone interested to get more interested in Filipino identity, but also in exploring how graphic novels can be used in the process, Halina Filipina is a very resourceful start.
Rating: 5 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review
No comments:
Post a Comment