In Memory of a Friend

UNO Magazine is celebrating its September 2010 issue in Fully Booked High Street, Fort Bonifacio on Monday, September 20 at 6 p.m. It is a fitting tribute to the late Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc.

Alexis Tioseco was founder of The Fully Booked Film Series, which is still ongoing. He was a regular customer at Fully Booked. I would see him quite a lot, especially when he was holding film showings, way before I started this blog. Nika Bohinc, his girlfriend, was also a brilliant film critic, and editor-in-chief of Ekran, a Slovenian publication on film.

When the people at Fully Booked heard of Alexis's untimely passing, those who knew him, were saddened and horrified by the news. It has been a little over a year since the tragedy occured, and still no justice has been given to these two lovely human beings.

The editor-in-chief of the Fully Booked Zine has agreed to let me republish an excerpt of an article that Alexis wrote for  them in December 2005, when they were still known as In-Print. It is a simple book review, but even then, before he became really renowned, his love and passion for film was so evident, not to mention his gift for words; it was also a portent of what he was to become--respected as he was in his field.

A short excerpt from a book review entitled Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema (The Collected writings of Noel Vera on Philippine Cinema from 1994-2004), written by Alexis Tioseco for In-Print in December 2005:

"Noel Vera is an anomaly in Philippine cinema... Opposition. If not an expletive (often spouted by those he has torn apart in his reviews), it is the first word that comes to mind when speaking of the writing of impassioned film critic Noel Vera. While this candor has gotten him into trouble in many instances, it also is, when paired with his intense passion for, and deep knowledge of cinema, is his greatest asset. Vera is not one who takes cinema lightly, nor is he one to bite his tongue and shy away from controversy, and rightly so. For what purpose does the critic exist if not to give an honest (and brutally so, when need be) assessment of a work?"

(Photos courtesy of UNO Magazine)