#chai fonacier

[vanessa-ives]

Eva Green (with Chai Fonacier and director Lorcan Finnegan) attends Nocebo photocall at Sitges Film Festival 2022 in Spain.

our queen is alive & well!

[filipeanut]

Finally got to watch Nocebo and it was awesome to hear Bisaya in a foreign film, let alone from one of my favorite actors, Chai Fonacier. "Unsay wa sa huna-huna?" What isn't in the mind?

Also leave it to an Irish director to portray an English citizen in... well watch to find out. In sum, Ara Chawdhury said it best in the article below: "Their [dystopian] fiction is our post-colonial reality.”

https://www.cnnphilippines.com/life/entertainment/Film/2022/11/15/nocebo-ara-chawdhury-chai-fonacier-interview.html

[iam-siriuslysher-lokid]

-Dolly De Leon (Triangle of Sadness)

-Chai Fonacier (Nocebo)

-Maria Clara at Ibarra

-Voltes V Legacy

✨️are the reasons I will not lose hope on Filipino cinema and television ✨️

cant wait for new, upcoming releases

[fourorfivemovements]

Films Watched in 2023:

07. Nocebo (2022) - Dir. Lorcan Finnegan

[nicholesavestheworld]

nocebo (2022)

[chaddiction]

NOCEBO. Some points are missing when they started the story until that reveal towards the end where it all makes sense. I still have questions though. Chai Fonacier is remarkable in here as she portrays her eerie character, Diana. It's nice to bring the Filipino folklore to Ireland. Eva Green of course in a psychological thriller is an amazing piece of work.

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/13/2022: NOCEBO (2022)

First things first: Right now, IMDB and Wikipedia are listing only director Lorcan Finnegan's creative partner Garret Shanley as the writer of NOCEBO. In reality, the Irish co-production is also written by Ara Chawdury, a Filipino woman who largely referenced her lifetime of research into her own family for this folk horror story involving her ancestors' religious practices. The movie is brand new, of course, so hopefully all the usual online resources will catch up soon enough.

The film itself is a curiosity, not because of its ethnographic content, but because the story is deadly serious, but the execution skews pretty campy. This review is really spoilery, but I think many viewers will cotton to what's going on right away: Eva Green plays a children's fashion designer who becomes abjectly, undiagnosably ill after an unspecified personal catastrophe. She blames her frequent memory lapses when Chai Fonacier surprises her on her doorstep, insisting that she has been hired to help out around the house. The young Filipino woman soon reveals that she is a kind of witch with the power to cure or destroy a person, and her desperate employer blithely assumes that she'll stick to the former option. Though Fonacier's true motivations are revealed slowly throughout the movie, it becomes obvious quickly that Eva Green's clothing is produced in a sweatshop where a devastating tragedy took place, and the young witch is here to enact her revenge.

The ending credits include a line that says "JUSTICE FOR KENTEX WORKERS," referring to a notorious 2015 factory fire that killed 74 people in Manila. NOCEBO is laced through with genuine angst about the perilous state of affairs for invisible brown labor, as Ara Chawdury noted in her introduction to the film at the opening night of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. Chawdury also acknowledged the risk she felt as a writer in vilifying poor Filipino workers, but all things considered, it's hard not to see Chai Fonacier's character as the hero, at least by the end of the film. She is a magnetic performer whose emotional performance does a lot of heavy lifting for what is a fairly simple tale of revenge.

But, at the same time that Fonacier is delivering an appropriate sense of real-world horror, NOCEBO has sort of a campy sensibility that I thought they might have pushed a little further still. The key image of the film is a zombie-like hound who deploys a whirlwind of large, pulsing ticks that trigger Eva Green's illness, and she has increasingly elaborate hallucinations about these insects that are frankly delightful, especially when they turn up at a fashion shoot and cover the dancing child models (who are "urban, ethnic, Southeast Asian!"), leaving behind infectious lesions. It's possible that this wasn't meant to be as much fun as I actually found it, but I'd like to think the filmmakers wouldn't begrudge me my good time. I also enjoyed the fact that they cast english rose Eva Green, and they just have her look completely wrung out for almost the entire movie—clammy, balding, and generally beat to shit. I appreciate the feeling of righteous vengeance that drives the plot about labor exploitation, but I also like it when movies take a little revenge on attractive people. NOCEBO just might have a little something for everyone.

[mrnotsosilent]

can we all talk about how chai fonacier really delivered her character well in nocebo? my filipino (bisaya) ass never rang louder with any films with filos representation, except this one. in some way, the film antagonizes our beliefs and practices, but it also highlights the concept of karma (gaba), which you get if you deserve it. sa amoa lang diring dapita na mga bisaya kay imbis piso kay bato ang ihatag and ang mapasahan kay ka bloodline ra.