Foster Child, renamed John John for its French release, was one of the major discoveries of the Director’s Fortnight at 2007 Cannes Film Festival. A discovery because the fifth movie of Brillante Mendoza is from a region -The Philippines- from where few films come to us even if they arouse more and more interest from festivals: Berlin Film Festival just showed the director’s sixth film, Tirador. A discovery that will remind us about another one, shown a few years earlier in Cannes, which describes in a very realistic way the journey of a father whose child was abducted. It’s the same anxiety of the loss that can be felt in the American Keane and the Philippine John John, the same way to follow a hero in long shots of pure strolling. But John John tells another story: Thelma’s one -a woman who raises orphans waiting for their adoption- and John John’s one -the child she is about to give to an American couple in a luxury Manilla hotel.

As often, the film is strengthened by his documentary precision. Through the adoption problem, we can see the human consequences of the unbalanced relationship between the North and the South. We can also admire the way Brillante Mendoza shoots the movements of her characters, from the shanty town where they live to the hotel where they split, leaving to us the discovery of a town and the way people inhabit it or how they are put away from the place where money and power are. We hope this very beautiful film will meet an audience and a larger distribution. France is the first country to show it after its release in The Philippines.

Bastien Hader