The extensive and various credits make it clear that this was a rarely found, genuine collaboration among myriad local Philippine businesses, citizens, governmental entities, and organizations, in an admirable display of national pride. Crowdfunding was a main source of financial backing for this uniquely elaborate film making process, making the finished product extra meaningful.
According to the filmmakers, Cleaners was filmed digitally on a Sony A7S in Tuguegarao in June 2019, led by a cast of non-professional actors portraying the students. Its estimated 40,000 frames were printed, photocopied, selectively crumpled, and then highlighted to indicate the protagonists before being digitally scanned for editing.
The most immediately observable strength of this film is its distinctively colorful look. More specifically, color focused, for it is actually in black and white, with the main characters, their clothing anyhow, literally colored in with bright neon highlighters. The film consists of five loosely connected stories, all taking place in the Catholic high school located in Tuguegarao. The title refers, literally, to the fact that the students are assigned to cleanup duty in the classrooms, and figuratively to the fact that in their individual stories they are all dealing with matters of being clean or pure against the unclean and superficial aspects of society and the greater outside world.
One would be curious to find out how Glenn Barrit thought up such an innovative and visually pleasing way to present his coming of age narrative; an artistic approach that manages to evoke feelings of childlike immaturity and nostalgic memories from the days of carelessly coloring outside the lines and amateurish comic book strips, while somehow also appearing sophisticated, especially when the "coloring" is extended in poetic ways, such as two characters' colors blending when they touch or hold each other. Another beautiful example comes as the very end of the film, in the shortest story that ties all the previous stories together, the only story to feature all the students in a mini screen therapy session. Each of the color coded characters seem to push their colors outward in a sort of aura around them as their individual colors permeates the air surrounding them and spreads into the items they are holding, such as the broom they are pushing, the chalkboard erasers they are dusting out, the papers and trash they sweep away.
Another integral ingredient to "Cleaners" is the soundtrack. I suspect the influence would be further increased for any viewers who are actually fluent in Tagalog, for even the subtitled lyrics were enough to make a positive influence, especially in the short about the three emo kids putting on a traditional Filipino skit for the school talent show.
The aspects that could be improved on in this were the details in the stories. This is not too say they were not good. Some were more interesting than others; they all effectively showed a facet of the stressors prevalent during the teenage years. But, overall, they were missing something that would make them as memorable as the visual artwork surrounding them. In other words, with a little better character development and scriptwriting; with the caliber of the dialogue and writing matching that of the mise en scène, this would have easily been a near perfect film. As it is, it is a highly commendable achievement that has appreciative audiences begging to know when Glenn Barrit will start on his sophomore piece?
