While seemingly akin to documentary methods of past eras, this mode of filmmaking differentiates itself in its realization of technological access as a means of formal emancipation. It is this approach to the cinematic subject - caught between chance and purposefulness - which has subsequently determined his cinema’s focus on family history and memory. Both of the filmmaker’s movies have been occasioned by yearly trips to the Philippines to visit family, and while his shoots follow a certain preconceived concept, he is also dealing in objects as they approach him in this way, happenstance both isn’t and is directing the course his film will take. Mantecon’s cinema is emblematic of an ascendant mode of filmmaking - one recognizable in precursors such as Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie and Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language, and in recent work by young filmmakers like Isiah Medina, Alexandre Galmard, and Kurt Walker - characterized by the piecemeal suturing of home video footage into aberrant continuities. This intimate yet casual exchange proved pivotal in coloring the filmmaker’s recollections of his time abroad and the film that followed, a chance occurrence that formed the point at which his memories are anchored.

The film draws its title from a poem by Chilam Balam, which appears in Lucia Berlin’s story “Toda Luna, Todo Año ,” and which was orally translated for him by his grandmother during his most recent stay in the Philippines. Todo y Todo, his second directorial effort, spirals outwards from the recollection of a shared moment with his grandmother into a contorted homemovie, advancing the viewer through tinted glimpses of family gatherings as they waver in and out of discernibility. The cinema of Miguel Mantecon finds its point of departure between recorded images and memory.

Universal cinema