Whispers within the Prism

CONTESTANT #4

(Short Film, 2006) by Jared Joven & Kaj Palanca

Canoy, Kate

Apura, Gabrielle 

Tolentin, Yanichel Marie 

Villoria, Lyka Sophia

21ST CENTURY LITERATURE 

Introduction

This analysis paper depicts the significance of the LGBT community lies in its advocacy for equality, human rights, and the recognition of diverse identities in society. How often most of the people in the rainbow community doesn’t truly embrace themselves in fear of being discriminated. For many, the decision to come out is accompanied by a mix of fear, uncertainty, and hope, as it involves revealing a core aspect of oneself to family, friends, and society. This aims to analyze and expound the meaning and beyond of the short film entitled “contestant #4”. Directed by then-16-year-old best friends, Celeste Lapida and Kaj Palanca, Contestant #4 premiered at the 2016 QCinema International Film Festival where it won the Audience Award for Short Films. It also won Best Short Film in the first-ever Shanghai Queer Film Festival in 2017, and proceeded to be screened in various film fests around the globe, such as Lovers Film Festival Torino LGBQTI Visions, Outfest, and Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. The film stars Joel Saracho and Elijah Canlas, Contestant #4 is a profound queer drama about what suppresses our freedom to express, to live, to be, and, why it’s never too late to reclaim that freedom.

Summary 

A young boy frequently visits an old man who lives alone, keeping him always in good company. One night, he chances upon the old man watching a dated clip of himself as a cross-dressing boy. This sparks within the young boy an interest to find out more about the old man's past. There was this one clip from the video where it shown the two were cleaning the whole house which the young boy always tell to sell and move into a much newer and nicer house, the young boy later on found out about the man being a cross-dresser and later on the young boy came out as gay. What he ultimately discovers aids both him and the old man towards a richer understanding of how the weight of life and identity should be carried. How much being “different” can be seen in many perspective by the society.

Biographical context analysis

Contestant #4 is a short Filipino film by Celeste Lapida and Kaj Palanca presented by Rappler Act One exploring the themes of identity and the weight of life. Celeste who was age sixteen, co-directed and wrote her first short, Contestant #4 , with Kaj Palanca in freshman year,  wrote Contestant # 4 because she was afraid to come out. Wanting to come out to her family, she thought of writing a story about an old man and a young boy and their friendship. From the start of the movie, the old man is watching an old dated clip of himself when he was a crossdresser boy in a pageant, which was the idea that came to Celeste after watching archival footage of her grandfather shot in Super 8 mm film, the same footage shown in the film, he was participating in a cross-dressing competition, as her grandfather ran the footage through an old projector. This pageant symbolizes self-expression or identity that connects to the old man’s past self shown in the old clip representing memory and nostalgia of the old man back when he was a crossdresser in a bygone era, which was then seen by the young boy by chance, piqued his curiosity to know more of the old man and their interactions and engagement showing generational connection and their friendship both allowed and aided them to have a rich understanding of the complexities of carrying one’s identity and personal history. Following the cultural and historical context seen in this short film, this old man’s experience as a cross dresser suggests the clip was somewhere in the mid 20th century or earlier, providing insight of the historical and cultural gender expression in the Philippines of that time period.

linguistic analysis

Contestant #4’s language structure emphasizes clarity and progression in a plain narrative manner. It uses rather straightforward sentence styles, which fit the story’s directness. “Frequent visits” suggest a long-term, almost ritualistic link between the younger and the elderly man by conveying regular behavior. The use of the phrase “chances upon” marks a pivotal moment in the story by denoting an unexpected and sudden finding that heightens the sense of surprise or revelation. The video used the term “dated clip” places it in a particular temporal perspective and indicates how far away the past and present are from one another. The word “cross-dressing boy” presents a crucial aspect of the elderly man’s concealed identity, nonetheless, it is descriptive rather than critical, gently urging the viewer to contemplate identification without bias. Using the metaphor of ignition, the phrase “sparks within the young boy an interest” draws attention to a curious moment and implies that this interest is dynamic and potentially transforming. Finally, “the weight of life and identity” suggests emotional depth and complexity by emphasizing the weight that both characters bear through the use of metaphorical language. 

Sociocultural

This narrative provides an insight on issues to do with identity, generational differences and changing perception to issues of gender and identity. The actual exposure of the young boy to the old man who used to dress like a boy and perform as a woman is a revelation of how gender, personal identity and one’s freedom to express himself/herself have changed over the years. The old man, or a man of a certain age and perhaps a timeframe in which such banality held true, harboured a piece of himself for decades. This revelation gives the young boy a chance to recognise the flexibility of the gender role in ways a modern mind will appreciate and shows how far society has come. Nevertheless, this is not only a story of tolerance that is more important in today’s world but also a story of how the burden of our own experiences affects the way we construct our subjectivity. On using elements from everyday culture to depict disabled characters, Davis considers this shocking device of Rogers’ story to be fitting because it uncovers that identity, outside the boxes of male/female, black/white, queer straight, etc, is more than one level deep, more than a person’s entire life can fit into one neatly-wrapped box. In this mutual engagement across the generation, they both learn; and the message passed across to each other, and probably to the young audience, is that acceptance of one’s self, as who one is or would want to be, even and especially when not in compliance with societal norms, is a progressive lesson that exists across the demarcation of generations. 

Conclusion

The reader is given a strong insight of the social and cultural transformations of identity across the generations. Rather, it underlines the need for integration of different generations and rejecting of generations’ conflicts whereas the happiness and burden of life and personal identity can be perceived and sustained with correct dignity only if society opens the doors to truthful existence.

Romans 15:7 NIV):

“Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God."

This verse requires Christians to accept people as they are, just as Christ accepts people without passing judgment over them, which is similar to the concept of tolerating people for who they are.