The film tells the story of a former 1980’s film cameraman who now currently works as a movie pirate operating in present day Manila. He routinely smuggles a digital camcorder into movie theaters in order to illegally record films. One night he records something else... And the footage goes viral.
In a typical playground, life plays a game of irony when two 8-year old kids are on a seesaw. One is a rather hefty child from a well-to-do family who is stuck at the bottom, whereas a lanky child brought up in poverty is on top. Rich kid is looking up to the poor boy, who in turn, is looking down on him. How will the rich kid reverse their positions? The answer to that question will make one realize that friendship is more valuable than money, while the other will discover his true worth as a friend.
The title “Kamera Obskura” is a Filipino spelling of the latin “Camera Obscura” which simply means “dark room”. The film’s concept adheres to formalist cinema, where the filmmaker’s thesis is to make a semblance of a vintage film seemingly produced sometime in the late 1920s to early 1930s in the Philippines. The thesis is to conjure up a film from a period that did not really exist in Philippine cinema’s historical cultural heritage as we know it, such as a pseudo-expressionist / experimental Filipino cinema of the silent film era. It is a film within a film. The narrative plays with the idea of a retro-futurist world where a prisoner locked away in a dark chamber for over two decades only sees the reality of the world outside through the small hole in his cell, which projects an image of the city on his wall, the phenomenon of the “camera obscura”.
