Pretty much out of the blue, a poor rural village by the river is
"occupied" by a filmcrew, and suddenly, everybody wants to have
a part in the film, which (as far as the villagers can tell) tells a
confusing and confused story about a group of soldiers and a mystical
river that makes one forget - actually, it's pretty much a routine low
budget action flick, but for the villagers, it's the greatest thing that
ever happened to them ... Lukas (Cheeno Ladera Dalog) is a pubescent boy
who has gotten a part of the movie, but as weird as life on a movieset can
get, his real life gets even stranger when his father (Edilberto
Marcelino) tells him, the pretty impressionable boy, that he's actually a
tikbalang a half-man-half-horse with supernatural powers. The next day,
dad is gone, and so is the lead actress (Tao Aves) of the film - and the
supernatural powers begin to manifest themselves in Lukas ... but hey,
maybe that's just part of the film - though on the other hand, maybe the
mystic river is for real ... Director John Torres wants Lukas
Nino to be an hommage to Filippino genre fare, and in a way, it
actually is, as it features scenes of vintage genre flicks, shows pictures
of locals imitating these scenes, scenes from an actual movie shoot and
the like - but at heart, the film is not so much about vintage genre
flicks as such as it is about the different layers of reality that
intertwine in a very weird way in Lukas Nino, up to a point that
the audience is no longer sure what belongs to which layer of reality -
and that's of course totally intended, actually reinforced in its mix of
home movie footage, filmclips, snippets that look as if they're from
auditions or rehearsals, and actual narrative pieces, which are often done
without dialogue but with subtitles, plus sometimes excerpts from the
screenplay are superimposed on screen. All of this is weird, and makes
the film at times hard to follow - and because of that, the whole thing is
a rather fascinating journey ...
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