When the Storm Fades: Curious Quasi-Documentary Highlights the Fallout from Deeds Gone Awry

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

Set three years after the 2013 Haiyan Typhoon devastated the Filipino coastal city of Tacloban, the film When the Storm Fades — from Filipino-Canadian filmmaker Sean Devlin — is an engaging oddity. It’s partly a documentary, partly a drama, and an instructional case study of how foreign intervention after a catastrophe can go wrong.

The heart of the film follows the real-life Pablo family: mother Nilda, father Abner, and their children, college-aged Lovely and adolescent son Arnel in scenes improvised around their real-life experiences and memories. They saw the roof blow off their house, experienced the deaths of relatives, and were rescued by a cargo ship. And now, they struggle to keep living. Nilda and her sister Imelda cook and sell spring rolls from a roadside stand. Lovely hopes to go to a Singapore college to finish her education as a chef.

There’s an intertwining fictional storyline about a Canadian couple of volun-tourists, played by Vancouver improv theatre comics Aaron Read as the cheerfully clueless Trevor, and Kayla Lorette as the earnest New Age-y Clare. Trevor, always eager to help and patronize, tries to teach Arnel about basketball and the entire Pablo family on the value of compost heaps. Clare is all about being “spiritual” in vague terms, which leads to puzzled curiosity from the Roman Catholic Pablo family.

By day, Trevor and Clare take selfies of themselves doing good deeds, and at night, they drink and sing karaoke at the local bars. In one scene, they meet another expat couple for drinks. The other couple are clearly better educated and culturally aware and the experience troubles Clare. She and Trevor are further at odds when Trevor develops a man crush on another white visitor Jerry (Ryan Bell), a hedonistic free spirit with a temporary Filipina girlfriend, who turns out to be a disaster profiteer.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

There are also a handful of scenes showing the efforts of real-life community activists, led by a young woman named Marissa Cabalja, who are struggling to keep the local community’s interests at the forefront of the recovery effort. They’re objecting to the lack of promised international aid, and the imposed construction of a tidal wall that will demolish existing communities.

For all its moments of fish-out-of-water humour and tourist-friendly cinematography (clouds of fireflies at night, sheet lightning behind a singer at a karaoke bar), When the Storm Fades has a blunt political message. The same wealthy countries responsible for the extreme weather events caused by climate change aggravate the disasters with their patronizing aid programs and vulture capitalism.

The attempt to soften this message with comedy sometimes results in a clash of tones, especially between the extremes of Trevor’s fictional tomfoolery, and Nilda Pablo’s real-life grief at the loss of her sister, as she walks through the wreckage of the dead woman’s home. Still, one can forgive Devlin’s desire to shake up the genre up for a broader audience than, for example, viewers of Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke (2006) or Raoul Peck’s Fatal Assistance (2014).

As well, the closing credits says the film was made according to the Jemez Principles, a set of inclusive guidelines for environmental organizers working with low-income and people-of-colour communities. Money raised for the film was used to help the Pablo family.

When the Storm Fades. Directed and written by Sean Devlin. Starring Kayla Lorette, Aaron Read and Ryan Bell, and with Marissa Cabalja and Abner, Nilda, Lovely and Arnel Pablo. Available on video-on-demand release.