Tribute: Alexis A. Tioseco and Nika Bohinc

I'm probably the wrong person to write this tribute, but I felt something needed to be said. I had never met, nor indeed had ever heard of Filipino-Canadian film critic Alexis A. Tioseco -- though he and I have been published in the pages of the same weekly paper -- or his Slovenian film journalist partner Nika Bohinc, who were killed by three burglars in their home in Manila last Tuesday night. (He was 29; she was 30.) A few of my colleagues knew them, and the heartfelt tributes have been pouring in. Raised in Vancouver, Tioseco moved back to his birthplace, the Philippines, in 1997. He started and ran a website called Criticine.com and contributed articles to other papers, magazines and websites. He focused mainly on Southeast Asian cinema, and felt that it was unnecessary to contribute to the already overloaded myriad of opinions on the latest English-language blockbuster.

Clearly he was intelligent, poetic and passionate on this subject. He fought -- and I mean fought --- for more films and better distribution for non-USA filmmakers. Like me, he was a fan of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but unlike me, he was also a personal friend, and Weerasethakul has already made a short film in tribute to Tioseco. Other tributes have come in from sources such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, Kim Voynar, Glenn Kenny and Jim Emerson.

The most striking thing that has surfaced is a piece that Tioseco recently wrote for the Filipino magazine Rogue, entitled "The Letter I Would Love to Read to You in Person." He wrote it to Bohinc, both to express his love for her, and for cinema in general. He argued that "the first impulse of any good film critic, and to this I think you would agree, must be of love. To be moved enough to want to share their affection for a particular work or to relate their experience so that others may be curious. This is why criticism, teaching, and curating or programming, in an ideal sense, must all go hand in hand."

That got me thinking, and I pondered it for hours over the weekend. It shamed me for wallowing in such petty matters as whether or not Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is any good, or worth anybody's time. And indeed, aside from a few easy laughs, it's not much fun slamming the latest beloved blockbuster, and my main reason for slamming films like that is that they deliberately undercut my beloved art of cinema; they don't even try. I have to admit that my real pleasure comes when I can help spread the word about something I love, something like Sita Sings the Blues or Treeless Mountain, that will barely get any kind of mention, even in this blog-o-rific film community of the 21st century.

Tioseco and Bohinc already knew that. They were lovers, not haters. They were poets, not cynics. They hoped, rather than despaired. They have inspired me, and I hope their words and actions can continue to inspire others.