Bebe Go’s 11 starts with a concession: “in february 2020, i received a grant to make a feature film,” reads its lime-green title cards. “the next month, the world ended. we made a film anyway.” Digging into the raw wound of COVID-19 is a risky gambit for filmmakers. Auteurs like Ari Aster and Olivier Assayas have anted their indie darling status by turning the clock back to 2020; projects like Together and Malcom & Marie floundered in the four-walled claustrophobia of quarantine domestic dramas. Mercifully, 11 doesn’t indulge in attempts toward thematic catharsis or lessons learned from a pandemic whose long tail still infects lungs and political ideologies today. Less documentary than document, 11 is a spare and sensuous snapshot of a pivot moment, a portrait of an artist as a young woman with her back against the wall.
11’s paper-thin membrane of fiction wraps itself around Bebe Go’s own experience as a fresh filmmaker. In a walled garden, mask dangling from her ear, Gabby (Gabby Padilla) bemoans the dashed dream of making a feature film. Festivals are cancelled left and right, funding options have dwindled to a thread. Like so many of us, Gabby spends her idle time trapped indoors scrolling. She notices a few Instagram stories from her friend, Tona (Tona Lopez). They’re posted from La Union, a former U.S. military base turned idyllic surf town, a short trip from Gabby’s home in the Philippines. Tona invites her out, and after some consternation — who wants to be another rich kid posting glamour shots while people die? — Gabby accepts the offer. Now, she can gaze at her crumbled future in paradise, sidestepping the ghosts of occupation along the way.
It’s easy to root for Gabby. She’s the sort of aspiring artist who eats and sleeps her dream: her hard drive is full of mp4s of films like The Act of Killing and The Bling Ring; she pores through the Criterion Channel and pauses to add Red Desert to her library. (The real Bebe Go devotes tumblrs to John Cassavetes and borrows a Metropolitan reference as a social media handle.) Instructively, Gabby hangs a poster of Joe Swanberg’s Art History on her bedroom wall. 11 doesn’t wield mumblecore’s textbook intimacy provocations, but it is slight and sly, a slice-of-life film with spectral themes and plot beats. Its lazy-river placidity and airiness — a door prize for delving back into the muck of COVID — makes one wonder if Gabby might have added a Hong Sang-soo flick or two to her Letterboxd watchlist.
Inspiration seldom hits when you expect it. Over glasses of wine in Tona’s La Union beach house, Gabby cycles through a library of sound effects, pausing to play and giggle over ominous whooshing and Jurassic growls. “I want to make a playlist of apocalyptic sounds,” she says. “In the Bible, the rapture… it started with sounds, the sounds of trumpets.” It’s a revelation for both Gabby and Bebe Go herself. After a sleepless night, Gabby wanders across gardens and abandoned poolsides to gather ambient wind, bird chirps, and cicada hisses. But her microphone peers through history: a collage of sound emerges with radio blips, recordings from the U.S. troops that once occupied La Union, and, yes, artillery trumpets. It’s as close as 11 allows itself to a thesis. The land Gabby and Tona tread cradles epochs, indifferent to the slurry of ambitions and illnesses that skate on its surface.
Go’s gentle hand is deceptively proficient here. Even the best COVID movie — 2025’s Eddington — proved unpalatable for most audiences, picking at scabs not yet healed and rolling in the slush of the American condition. From the other side of the globe, 11 understands there’s no figuring out our lost year(s). Those that survived did so without direction, trading between days idle and life-altering with little warning, buffing the smudges from crystal balls while history gurgled under our feet. “The film you have just seen was an improvisation,” an ending title card reads before the credits roll. It’s a blessing that Bebe Go can think on her feet.
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