NAGA CITY—Drawing more than 12 million viewers as of Saturday, a short film about hunger shot here by a Bicolano filmmaker has pricked the conscience of people around the world, who said it made them cry.

“Chicken a la Carte” by Ferdinand Dimadura, shot in 2005, beat some 3,600 entries when it won the 56th Berlin Film Festival award for short films in 2006. Its biting commentary has drawn viewers to the website www.cultureunplugged.com and YouTube.

The film is “about hunger and poverty brought about by globalization,” the synopsis says.

“There are 10,000 people dying every day due to hunger and malnutrition. This short film shows a forgotten portion of society … What is inspiring is the hope and spirituality that never left this people.”

It’s a story of people scavenging for food so they can survive. The film has no dialogue and is without the melodrama common to many other Filipino films, and it has an ironic twist.

The film starts with a familiar scene showing neon signs of fast-food chains in Naga City and two young ladies entering a restaurant and ordering food.

Dimadura shifts to a scene outside the restaurant showing a skinny man driving a “padyak” (foot-pedalled bicycle with a sidecar) toward the eatery.

The man goes to the kitchen and to a bin where the slop had been dumped. He segregates and collects the leftovers, then drives home.

Grace at the end

A later scene shows the man arriving at the poor community where he lives. Children welcome him and soon are seen scrambling for the slop.

In the final scene, the man reaches his shanty, where his pregnant wife and his children await him. She starts setting the table and he distributes the leftovers from the restaurant on each plate, and sits down.

He gently taps the hand of his daughter, who is in a hurry to eat her share. He makes the Sign of the Cross and leads in the saying of grace before the family begins to eat the leftovers. The film ends on that scene.

With a background song that Dimadura himself composed and sang, the film delivers a final blow to people’s indifference to the problem of hunger, haunting the viewers with its lyrics:

Let me tell their story/ that no one else can hear/ How can someone’s laughter/ bring me close to tears/ And you’ll never know/ ‘cause you’re never there/ After what we’ve seen/ can we close our eyes again?

Anger, shame

The film is over in five minutes, leaving an impact hugely disproportionate to its length, judging from comments of thousands of viewers on www.cultureunplugged.com, the YouTube and blogs.

Their comments range from approval of the film to anger, shame and guilt.

A viewer writing as Solita Arango de Figueroa says: “Exceptionally good. It made me cry. The young father blessing the food touched my heart. I wish I were rich to satisfy the hunger of many people. And to think that there have been persons who pay millions to go to space, instead of doing something in favor of those very poor.”

“This short film made my heart cry,” Mabe739 comments. “We complain [of] small things in life and only see our problems, [while] there are so many people in the world dying of hunger, we should appreciate life and the good fortune of [being] born in a country where there is no hunger … This film should be seen in every country in this planet.”

“I am devastated by this short film,” Shan551 says.

Writes fbUS909: “This film obviously refers to the Philippines where in my opinion the biggest problem is corruption not brought on globalization but by their own government organizations. This corruption even leads to misappropriation of goods intended to aid the needy.”

A true story

Dimadura was surprised at how a five-minute film could draw huge attention from around the world. He told the Inquirer he based the film on a true story but that it did not point to one particular family of scavengers.

He said the concept came to him after his employer years back told him about a man who collected slops in a restaurant. His employer owned a fast-food chain and Dimadura worked as creator of 30-second ads for the company.

Dimadura said he shot the film in just one day, mobilizing his friends and urban poor dwellers scavenging at Naga’s Balatas dump to shoot it.

Earlier this month, Dimadura was a guest director at a new film festival held in Nova Scotia, Canada dubbed “Slow Motion”, which revolved around the subject of food.

Dimadura’s “Chicken a la Carte” and another of his short films, titled “Binamban—the glorious food of Lagonoy,” had a gala screening at the Canada festival, with other featured films that included other hard-hitting documentaries from countries like Canada and Denmark.

“The first time I saw his (Dimadura’s) film in the Web, I knew I had to look for this guy and ask him to be part of our historic festival,” festival programmer Jack Schoon writes in an e-mail.

Hopefully, the beginning

Dimadura, who captured the culture of his hometown in “Binamban,” also won in the Slow Food Short Film Competition in Torino, Italy, in 2006. He beat 400 other entries.

“I am happy that an honest-to-goodness storytelling of the plight of the poor in our place has captured the hearts of many viewers. I hope this will be the beginning of real reforms that would benefit the most needy and dehumanized in our society,” he said.