AFTER MAKING MOVIES FOR 11 YEARS, Erik Matti has finally done a film he can call his own.

He titled it “The Arrival.”

The first part was shot in Manila in 2007 and 2008—a four-day shoot. The remaining six days were shot during Holy Week of 2009 in Murcia, Negros Occidental, a small town 30 minutes away from Bacolod.

“I did it at my own pace,” Matti said. He wrote the script after a 10-day improvisational workshop with his original cast. “I drafted the script’s outline and had the actors improvise before I wrote the full screenplay.”

DWIGHT Gaston plays a bookkeeper who searches tenaciously for the girl of his dreams, played by Amanda Cajili.

“The Arrival” is about Leo, a stifled bookkeeper (Dwight Gaston) who runs away to Murcia, in search of a house and a woman that he sees in his dreams.

As luck would have it, Matti’s first choice for the lead role, Gaston, was free from TV work by the time the cameras started rolling.

“Leo is a difficult role. You need to know a person like Leo to be able to play him. Dwight is an intelligent actor. He’s often cast in comedy, but he’s an intense dramatic actor as well,” Matti pointed out.

Gaston is a stage and indie veteran but not a marquee name. The two other main cast members, Dennis Ascalon and Milton Dionson, were Matti’s hometown friends.

All the way

Matti did things his way, all the way. Moreover, he set the movie in his home province of Negros Occidental. He cast his own mother, Julieta Matti, in a scene-stealing role. “She’s good,” he said. “I had a script ready for her, but her 77-year-old mind couldn’t handle memory work so she improvised everything.”

“The Arrival” is Matti at his most personal. “After years of working in the mainstream, I wanted to get off my back all pressures of studio production, executives telling you to be efficient at the expense of creativity, telling you how to tell your story.”

Even though he has made commercially viable films like “Scorpio Nights 2,” “Pasiyam” and “Exodus,” Matti admitted that he’s always been an “outsider” in the industry.

DWIGHT Gaston plays a bookkeeper who searches tenaciously for the girl of his dreams, played by Amanda Cajili.

“It’s been said that my films have no heart just because I don’t do a lot of crying scenes. I’ve been accused of not knowing how to tell a story because I avoid using words to move the plot forward,” he noted. “After years of being told that … ‘The Arrival’ is me arriving at myself and what I want to do as an artist. From now on, I will do movies the way I want to see them as a member of the audience.”

Private exercise

Precisely for that reason, he is reluctant to hold a commercial run of “The Arrival.” He said, “I don’t want to burden viewers with a ticket and have them sit through a filmmaker’s private exercise.”

Thus far, “The Arrival” has been screened only at the Cinema Rehiyon of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and in the Bacollywood film fest in Bacolod.

Matti has sent screeners to festivals abroad, though. The movie has a screening scheduled in the buyers’ market in Hong Kong later this month. It has also been invited to Italy next month. There’s another screening in Bacolod in July, with proceeds going to the Negros Museum.

Honest, truthful

The filmmaker explained: “Since it’s very personal, I initially showed it only to people close to me and, I thought, that’s it—it stays as it is; it has served its purpose.”

He got the surprise of his life when “The Arrival” was nominated for eight Urian awards. His movie and Arnel Mardoquio’s “Hospital Boat” are two of the unheralded “regional” films that figure prominently in this year’s Urian, given by the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino.

Matti is nominated for Best Film, Director and Screenplay; Gaston for Actor and Ascalon and Dionson for Supporting Actor.

“Dr. Mike Rapatan (Urian member and Cinema Rehiyon organizer) saw it in Bacolod and asked for a review copy,” Matti related. “I’m happy that they liked it, but happier for the recognition given to the actors, whose work as a whole is honest and truthful.”