‘Where the Night Stands Still’ is a haunting look at Filipino workers in Italy

Also written, photographed and edited by Dela Cruz, the film’s mere 75-minute runtime provides numerous haunting in-roads to the fractal, fractured nature of migrancy in the west—a Russian nesting doll of wistfulness and resentment, of economic hardship and opportunity. It begins with the abstract closeup of an elderly Filipina maid, the silver-haired Lillia (Tess Magallanes), who stands in darkness, but whose face is enveloped by a movie projection, as though some pre-ordained cinematic identity had been foisted upon her. Filipina household helpers are often reduced to window dressing in western cinema, but Where the Night Stands Still clears a unique path for Lillia and characters like her. After a morning prayer (in both Italian and Tagalog), we see her perform the tasks for which she was hired several decades ago, sweeping a sprawling countryside estate awash in shadow, leaving her work as the only thing defining her shape—her very being—much like Dela Cruz’s photographs. There is, however, a wrinkle to this story: Lillia’s employer, Signora Patrizia, has recently died, leaving her everything she owned.

Her relationship to this space is still distinctly labor oriented, a specter that isn’t quite erased by her ownership. However, it’s brought into clearer focus by the movie’s main plot, when her two siblings come to visit. Her sister Rosa (Jenny Llanto Caringal) and brother Manny (Benjamin Vasquez Barcellano Jr.), fellow domestic workers elsewhere in the country, are significantly younger than Lillia, and didn’t have much of a choice when she and their late parents set off for Italy in search of a better life. Manny still harbors a grudge against his older sister for this, a tension that takes curious audio-visual form: the film’s dialogue is, at least at first, formal and stilted to the point of feeling inhumane. Meanwhile, the monochrome palette has its contrast turned up to 11, creating a stark image in which blown-out highlights sit shoulder to shoulder with a haunting darkness you could practically tumble down, as voices echo through darkened spaces.

Tess Magallanes as Lillia in "Where the Night Stands Still."

Courtesy of Berlin Film Festival

The question of why Rosa and Manny have come to visit their sister looms over their introductions. They would hardly be history’s first family members to come calling when one of their own wins the proverbial lottery, but once these financial questions are finally broached, their chatters flows more smoothly, and the frame becomes more easy on the eyes, as if the film, having held on to a grudge, has breathed a sigh of relief.

The dreamlike quality never fully fades, though it gives way at times to conversational tributaries backed by soothing natural ambience as the siblings catch up and reminisce. However, they never feel quite comfortable, as though they belong in this space, even though it’s legally theirs (or legally Lillia’s, anyway). What they each inherit isn’t just a matter of assets and ones and zeroes, but the experience of being severed from a place and its culture. The Philippines, which they haven’t been able to visit for some time, now exists more as an abstract concept to them, than as something literal and tangible—their efforts to conjure nostalgia through banana chips and other delicacies notwithstanding—not unlike the fading memories of their parents.

After a while, their recollections feel contradictory, not because they remember different things, but because they remember differently. Where Lillia’s emigration was a matter of finding identity, Manny—who had far less of a choice in the matter—was prevented from fully forming one, and now struggles to find his place and to keep a steady job. As soon as this animosity resurges, the film pivots back to its noticeably harsher aesthetics and withdrawn tonalities, practically losing its visual identity in the process.

From left, Jenny Llanto Caringal, Tess Magallanes, and Benjamin Vasquez Barcellano Jr. in "Where the Night Stands Still."

Courtesy of Berlin Film Festival

Fittingly, the siblings often discuss dreams and the experience of being visited by ghosts, which is not unlike their own presence in Where the Night Stands Still. They are wanderers in a world created by (and for) someone else, scrambling to stay afloat, and unable to enjoy even the spoils that come their way when this hierarchy is suddenly disrupted. They’ve been on the lowest rung of this system and its rat race for far too long, both as individuals, and as part of a lineage dating back to Spanish colonialism. It’s practically seeped into their bones, ensuring that the movie’s surprising final turn—sure to knock the wind out of any viewer—feels wholly in tune with its story, and its characters’ deep-seated desperation and resentment, despite its sudden arrival.

A haunting rumination on spaces, told through the fragile dynamic of three Filipino siblings, Where the Night Stands Still is a meditative work in the tradition of Lav Diaz, albeit with a much more truncated runtime. It’s a film of strange, unsettling outcomes, if only because the fated appearance of sudden wealth and possibility proves inadequate in the face of gaping wounds that follow its characters across oceans and generations.