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Pause to remember

The next couple of weeks will see the usual deluge of red-carpet reportage from the Toronto Film Festival. I’ll be part of that, of course, writing and blogging and Twittering as time allows, but before we plunge headlong into the festival, we should take a moment to remember two film writers who won’t be with us.

Their names were Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc, and they were murdered earlier this week in the Philippines – shot dead, to be horribly specific, during an apparent robbery in their Quezon City home.

TIFF programmer Raymond Phathanavirangoon posted a lovely, sad remembrance on the festival blog, and is dedicating the screenings of Raya Martin’s Independencia to their memory. (Martin, who knew the couple well, has cancelled his Toronto plans in the wake of their deaths.)

I didn’t know Tioseco or Bohinc personally, though we were all members of the international critics organization FIPRESCI. As one of FIPRESCI’s web editors, I edited Tioseco’s report from the Oberhausen Film Festival in 2007, which focused on Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Bohemian Rhapsody Project. And through that excellent piece of writing, I found his website, Criticine, which dedicated itself to “elevating discourse on Southeast Asian Cinema”, and did exactly that.

There’s not much more to say. Two nice young people are dead. The film festival will roll forward, and no one will mention their names too much, so as not to spoil the party. But it seems worth a mention now.[rssbreak]

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