FATHER Peter Malone, MSC, an internationally known film critic was in town recently to conduct a seminar on Film and Faith at the Communications Foundations in Asia (CFA) which were attended by priests, religious, educators, and lay, working with media evangelization. Among the 110 participants in the seminar were the executive secretary of the CBCP Office on Women, Dr. Zenaida Rotea, and movie reviewers of Catholic Initiative for Enlightened Movie Appreciation (CINEMA).
Malone, a consultant to the Pontifical Council of Social Communications and former president of the International Organization for the Cinema (OCIC), and SIGNIS, was instrumental in the formation of movie reviewers and assessors which comprise the present group of CINEMA reviewers from the CBCP Office on Women.
According to CBCP Office on Women, executive secretary Dr. Zenaida Rotea, it was out of the initial 4-day seminar conducted by Malone in Manila on January 12-15, 2000, that “CINEMA was formed, and competent movie reviewers and assessors were trained and appointed.” This preliminary seminar was followed by a six-month intensive workshop. In July 2000, CINEMA was launched.
Malone had been in the country a few times, but it was his third time to come and visit CINEMA at the Office on Women. Rotea said that CINEMA makes it always a point to invite Malone whenever he is in the Philippines to give him an update on what the group is doing.
In his meeting with the group last January 18, Malone praised CINEMA for what it had accomplished since its beginning. He commended the group for being able to sustain this kind of work. Malone also expressed his wish that every Episcopal Conference in the world will have a body of movie reviewers as sustainable as CINEMA.
In the past six years, CINEMA had conducted eleven seminars on “Film Review and Classification which had an over all total of 187 participants. It also conducted two seminars on TV advocacy against pornography. The review body has had 45 assessors and 16 writers who had reviewed 636 movies.
“CINEMA provides a great service by its perceptive reviews, mediating the film to the public of believers and those who do not share our faith,” said Malone.
Malone is a member of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. He is a native of Australia but currently resides in London and works for SIGNIS film desk. Having finished his term as president of SIGNIS, Malone said he is freer now to go around and do things that he loved most; that, of “being a bridge between the Church and the professional world of cinema—by review, by juries at festivals, those kinds of interactions.” He noted that there are a lot of opportunities that can be explored, “[whether] publishing books, whether it be expanding the juries, whether it be seminars or dialogues, all those kinds of things.”
