'Fisting' Would Have Had the Best Poster of Any Filipino Movie This Year
Film posters are an art form of their own. If pictures are worth a thousand words, how can you make one speak for a film running at 24,000 words per second? A good poster piques the audience’s curiosity without giving too much away; the best posters get that balance and leave you asking for more.
One of the entries to this year’s Cinema One Originals Festival just hit a home-run with theirs. The film was called Fisting (Never Tear Us Apart), until last Tuesday, when the production announced that it had to change its title to just Never Tear Us Apart. This also meant that they had to take down all their promotional materials, including this poster. Nevertheless, Fisting will live on in spirit. Just look at it:
Isn’t it wonderful? It’s like a magic hole that you just want to reach into. The longer you stare at this poster, the more you ask yourself, “Is this real? Is anything? Am I?”
Well, it is real, but it's probably not what you think it is. Prior to the change of title, director Whammy Alcazaren stressed: "Fisting is a family film."
"I think a lot of people have gotten it, that there is a joke to it," Alcazaren said. “What's represented by the title [Fisting] is visualized by the image of the family climbing uphill, with all of these hidden things, and that concept and what the film’s about are the same thing. There's something more to it, and what do we see is what we choose to see.”
Alcazaren collaborated with Serious Studio to come up with the poster. "I came to them with the title already. The concept of a family going up a hill was always my idea for a poster," he recalls. "It was a three months-long process of back-and-forth on how to make this visually striking but subtle, so the joke is just hidden."
The effort shines through once you really look at the poster. Deane Miguel-Cruz, one of Serious Studio’s founders, says, "If anything, the goal was to make people loosen up to the film, and if people are talking about this poster, then I’d like to think we did a good job."
Despite the swift developments, the poster has certainly gotten people talking, and hopefully, they’ll be loosened up enough to the idea of watching it.
The movie stars Ricky Davao, Meryl Soriano, and Jasmine Curtis-Smith; and tells the story of an aging spy and the afflictions of his family.
Never Tear Us Apart is an official entry to the 2018 Cinema One Originals. Catch it on October 12-21, 2018.
