Brillante Mendoza | Philippines, France| 2009 | 110' | Filipino, Tagalog spoken, Dutch subtitles A story about young people from the point of view of two grandmothers (lola is Tagalog for “grandma”). Two older women appear at a police station: one to identify the body of her murdered grandson, the other to visit her grandson, who is accused of the murder, in the police cells.
There is no place for anger or sorrow in the lives of these two poverty-stricken women: they are completely consumed by the practical and financial consequences of the crime. Murder victim Arnold’s grandmother has to get a death certificate and collect the insurance money from his employer to be able to pay for a coffin. Mateo’s grandmother has to somehow find the money to pay her grandson’s bail on the streets of Manila.
Lola shows the hard lives of the urban underclass in grainy, quasi-documentary images. Mendoza’s materialist perspective on such a serious crime underlines the fact that moral judgement is a luxury many people simply cannot afford. Lola was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival.
