Tribeca Film Festival 2010 Preview: Brillante Mendoza’s Lola

Welcome back to our series of Tribeca Film Festival previews, where we highlight a film that will be screening over the next few weeks. This week we’re showing you the trailer for Brillante Mendoza’s film, Lola. This is one of Rudie’s most anticipated films, and we’ll be sure to cover it on the next bonus podcast episode, regarding the Tribeca Film Festival.

Lola will be screening all weekend (April 22, 23, 24) at the Village East Cinema 4 and the Clearview Chelsea Cinema 8. For a complete list of screening times and venues, head over to the official Tribeca page. You can also become a fan of the film over on Facebook, although I cannot confirm that the page is official. They also link to an official website, but I was getting an error  every time  I tried visiting it.

Are you planning on attending the Tribeca Film Festival? Which films are you most excited about? What do you think of the Lola trailer? Let us know in the comments below.

Two elderly matriarchs bear the consequences of a crime involving their grandsons: One is murdered, the other is the suspect. As the intense financial strains of a burial and legal case weigh on both women, they individually traipse around the prisons, funeral homes, and courtrooms of Manila amidst torrents of rain, while simultaneously struggling to maintain their families’ lives in the makeshift shacks built along the city’s rising waterways. Face-to-face with each other, they work together to reach a common, if compromised, resolution.

Capturing the desperate and frantically beautiful texture of the urban Manila landscape,  Lola confirms the depth and range of Filipino director Brillante Mendoza’s vision. Anita Linda and Rustica Carpio deliver incisive performances as the two determined leads in writer Linda Casimiro’s penetrating critique of the criminal justice system, its accompanying bureaucracy, and the incomplete quest for justice and reconciliation.

–Roya Rastegar