i grew an inch when my father died

The Filipino island of Leyte is known historically for having been the theatre of the largest naval battle ever, during the Second World War. But with his first feature film, P.R. Monencillo Patindol brings us there to discover a little story about a teenager, his younger brother and his best friend. A village, the river and the wild forest nearby constitute their cosmos, even if Manila, the capital, haunts the rural universe as a promise of emancipation, or probably as escape from the difficulties of their story. And the story they have in common is a story of grief: the trauma of having lost a father, killed by the father of the best friend. The reactions of the two brothers express two opposite ways of dealing with the trauma: the younger boy takes shelter in silence and introversion, his world becoming hallucinated, closer to wildness than society, whereas the teenager clumsily but persistently tries to defend the friendship with the killer’s son, slowly realising that this implies severing ties with the patriarchal society that discriminates them. i grew an inch when my father died explores the complex disentanglement from the fathers, be they figures of a patriarchal society or examples of weakness and violence.

If Patindol is effective in the exploration of this complex situation where filial affection and hope for individual transformation are intertwined and conflicting at the same time, it is because of his strong formal choices. The desaturation of colours makes the story almost timeless and universal, while also expressing the erosion of the social and natural environment. Moreover, it allows the individual characters to emerge. In this aesthetic framework, colours will work both as aching wounds and glimpses of hope. Even while working with non-professional actors, Patindol manages to structure the emotional throughline of the film in moments of silence, where contemplation leaves room for tension and the labour of feelings. But the most striking aspect of i grew an inch when my father died is its montage: Patindol’s almost nervous high pace of cuts does not enhance action, it rather scatters the narrative lines and builds a constellation of moments that allow us to gradually approach the emotional and symbolic core of the film, between grief and emancipation, heritage and freedom.

The montage of the film equally allows to compose a landscape where the village and the forest symbolically represent the social bond and constraints on one side, and wildness and freedom on the other. In the middle, the flow of the river is the visual and geographical centre of the landscape, evoking the theme of the passage of life and of time. We have the impression that the film does not display but discovers and adapts itself to the environment. The insistence of the camera on flowers and trees, and the amazing sound design reveal the continuity between the interiority of the characters and nature. Faces and river stones, bodies and the leaves of the trees resonate. Somewhere in the forest, in its vibration, we will find the possibility for a new brotherhood.