this time of crisis." The newsreel ends just as abruptly and the narrative resumes. The woman's little boy is now grown up and living very comfortably in the jungle. His makeshift family has discarded the few things that remained from their civilized life in the city. The child, not knowing about life below the mountains at all, is not afraid to roam in the jungle. He keeps telling the man and the woman of the white ghosts he sees between the trees. The man and the woman realize these are the soldiers and that it is only a matter of time before they are found. One night, while the man and the boy embark on a hunting expedition, a storm begins to rage across the jungle. It blows away their makeshift hut, killing the woman inside. The man also dies protecting the boy and keeping him dry. The boy wanders the jungle alone, until American soldiers find him. Terrified, he runs away from them, and the soldiers promptly shoot at him. The boy climbs up the mountain. His shirt slowly becomes hand-painted as he jumps off a cliff to his death. The sky in the backdrop also becomes hand-painted, first a faint yellow, to a bright orange, then finally a deep red. Cast Tetchie Agbayani as the mother Sid Lucero as the man Alessandra de Rossi as the woman Mika Aguilos as the boy Production Raya Martin developed the film as an homage to the early Hollywood studio system, which has greatly influence Filipino cinema. He wanted to capture the feel of films shot in the early 20th century, and this involved shooting entirely inside a studio, a practice that was popular in the early days of Hollywood cinema. Since most of the film was set in the jungle, they basically had to reconstruct a jungle location indoors. Martin's production design team, headed by Digo Ricio, placed trees and plants both fake and real, and painted all of the backdrops for the scenes. Film critic Graham Fuller said that the film "harnesses the aesthetics and artifice of silent films and early talkies: their grammar, look, acting, and cinematographic tricks." Reception Independencia was one of two films from Raya Martin that were screened as official selections at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and was the first Filipino film to be selected for the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film