Cleaners

Directed by Glenn Barit, this Filipino film follows high school students assigned to clean their classroom at the end of the day in Tuguegarao during the 2007 and 2008 school year, structured in six chapters. But the real story is in how it was made: after shooting digitally, the frames were exported at eight frames per second, each numbered, printed with a photocopy texture, then hand colored with highlighter pens over only the areas containing the main characters, with some frames deliberately crumpled before the sheets were scanned back in. A team of six, joined by volunteers on weekends, worked through close to forty thousand frames in twenty three days. Each character was assigned a different highlighter color. Barit's reasoning was thematic: photocopying and hand marking produce unpredictable errors, which matches the film's subject of deviating from what is clean and flawless. It swept Best Film, Best Screenplay and the Audience Award at QCinema, then won five categories at the national awards. When the film received an R-13 rating, Barit refused to self censor, putting it this way: if we self censor, the point of the film might not be as strong. Who it's for: Lovers of formal experiment and handmade animation technique, and anyone wanting a coming of age story told in an unfamiliar language. Who it's not for: Not for viewers expecting a clean image, since the entire aesthetic is deliberately rough and flawed.