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Tambolista
English Translation: Drummer
English Title: Drumbeat
Year of Release: 2007 / B & W
Director: Adolfo Alix Jr. [as Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr.]
Screenwriter: Ave Regina S. Tayag
Producers: Cinema One Originals & Ignite Media
Cast: Jiro Manio, Coco Martin, Sid Lucero, Anita Linda, Fonz Deza, Ricky Davao, Susan Africa, Simon Ibarra, Jhersie Young, Zyra dela Cerna, Mosang
Jason and Billy, whose parents have to stay in a hospital when their mother delivered their sister, invite their neighbor Pablo after he leaves his rental space because his landlord caught him in bed with his wife. All are short of money: Billy needs to spring for an abortion for his girlfriend, Jason wants to buy a drum set so he ca
n play for a band, and Pablo has to find a new place to stay. The brothers get by doing favors for their neighbors while Pablo offers his body to prospective clients of either gender. When the eccentric and quarrelsome elderly lady across the street asks them to exchange smaller bills for her money, they cook up the idea of burglarizing her.
An appreciation for Tambolista can be enhanced by situating it in the tradition of the multicharacter youth films of the previous millennium. The male-focused entries tended then to depict the characters’ hijinks, carefree and harmless; but as a millennial product, released toward the end of a still-democratic era, the film enables us to see how neoliberalism has finally caught up with the very citizens we’re expected to shield from the harsh realities of modern existence. Director Adolfo Alix Jr. observed twin strategies, one old-timey and one forward-looking, to enhance his material: in shooting in black and white, he facilitates a throwback to the social-realist treatments of the First Golden Age, while in fractalizing the temporal order of events, he provides an equivalent of the social media-engendered confusion and distractedness that would increasingly afflict young people. The combination is unexpectedly yet remarkably effective, but also, in being too new-fashioned yet old-looking, accounts for how easily the film could be overlooked in comparison with his other output. Tambolista, rather than any number of prematurely acclaimed works, is where to start with this restless, unpredictable, admittedly uneven filmmaker.
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Imoral
English Title: Immoral
Year of Release: 2008
Director: Adolfo Alix Jr. [as Adolfo B. Alix Jr.]
Screenwriter: Jerry Gracio
Producer: Bicycle Pictures
Cast: Katherine Luna, Paolo Paraiso, Arnold Reyes, Edgar Allan Guzman, Perla Bautista, Kristoffer King, Adriana Agcaoili, Cherrie Madrigal, Angeli Bayani, Adrian Racho, Agnes de Guzman, Rolly Palmes, Armando A. Reyes, Maxie Evangelista, Melvin Catubag, Kennyron Aroffo, Jerome Zamora, Marcie Rosario, Lisa Arnaiz, Herwey Naredo, Jojo Manalili, Johnson Orca
Finding they cannot afford the living spaces they want to rent, Abi and Dante allow their friend Jonathan to get a residence for them. He introduces Abi as his wife and Dante as his brother-in-law to the religious landlady, when in fact Dante is the lover that he and Abi share. Jonathan pays for the rent using his income as construction foreperson while Dante barely scrapes by as a cab driver, longing for the time when he can leave for overseas work. Aside from defending their arrangement with her mother and sister, Abi makes sure that Dante doesn’t lose hope from their destitution and strives to be a friend to Jonathan, whose friendship with a construction worker incites Dante’s jealous rage. A sudden and unexpected windfall, however, threatens to throw their lives into disarray.
Before the internet-assisted boys’ love (BL) trend disseminated throughout Southeast Asia and reached the Philippines during the lockdown period of the last global pandemic, gay cinema was a specialized trend that actually occasioned the country’s first digital-format theater screenings. The films did not differ all that much from the then-forthcoming BL entries, which in turn also mirrored the same masculinist middle-class limitations of several new “queer” cinema samples from the US. Imoral may initially resemble the typical essentially conservative text in being low-end, domestic-focused, and anti-feminine, but it makes enough subtle adjustments to distinguish itself as one of the rare gay films with social awareness, more responsive actually to indigent conditions. It doesn’t shy away from class- and gender-based discord, but it also finds ways of uncovering how less-privileged citizens attain measures of acceptance on their own terms, with the striving for basic decency always an ideal within reach, if difficult to grasp. The one character tactfully rejected by the central trio is the pushy proselytizer who owns their space—a sign that better days may yet be in the offing for the gender outlaws in our midst.
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Isda
English Title: Fable of the Fish
Additional Language: Bikol
Year of Release: 2011
Director: Adolfo Alix Jr.
Screenwriter: Jerry Gracio
Producers: Cinemalaya Foundation & Phoenix Features
Cast: Cherry Pie Picache, Bembol Roco, Anita Linda, Rosanna Roces, Angel Aquino, Alan Paule, Evelyn Vargas, Arnold Reyes, Jess Evardone, Darlene Anderson, Pamela Juan, Angeli Bayani, Leon Miguel, Bjorn Aguilar, Kerbie Zamora
Merlina Sagaral and her husband Miguel migrate from distant Pangasinan province. They rent space in a landfill where the residents scrounge for materials they could resell. The wives talk about how having a child enables them to keep their husbands; despite being elderly, Lina longs to bear a child when her landlady shares news of her own pregnancy. Eventually Lina shows signs of gestation and Miguel, who gets angry when his neighbors tease him about infertility, is overjoyed. Lina’s birth pains occur during a typhoon, when their floor is flooded, but her baby leaps into the water and is discovered to be a fish. A TV reporter takes an interest in Lina’s story and becomes her friend, but Miguel cannot accept that he fathered a non-human child and becomes an alcoholic. When the couple discover an anonymous victim of extrajudicial killing dumped on the landfill and look for anything valuable he might have on him, they find a stash of money that enables them to upgrade their living condition.
Despite its English title, Isda unfolds as a straightforward realist narrative, and uses the fantastic premise of (for want of a better term) monstrous childbirth as its means of providing an intimate account of the lives of a dispossessed elderly couple. Even the fact that they could get pregnant is miraculous enough, considering the travails of migration as well as the health hazards of living amid the methane emission of the landfill. Yet the cast’s proficient realization of the absurd, essentially comic situation in which their characters are lodged promotes a mounting empathy that acquires conflictive dimensions when the central couple find their marriage foundering because of the unusual nature of their offspring. As portrayed by Cherry Pie Picache, whose rendition of benevolence is unmatched among local actors, Lina becomes the character whose devotion to her fish-child is full-fledged—making understandable how the women in her orbit share in her maternalistic concerns and even how her husband occasionally finds himself bending to her will despite his shame and resentment. The film material itself takes off from a tabloid report that turned into a short-lived urban legend, but the means by which its collection of talents reified what would have otherwise remained an incredulous account is the movie’s singular hook, line, and sinker attraction.
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Porno
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 2013
Director: Adolfo Alix Jr. [as Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr.]
Screenwriter: Ralston Jover
Producers: Cinemalaya Foundation, Phoenix Features, Deux Lux Mea Films
Cast: Adriana Gomez, Janvier Daily, Yul Servo, Rosanna Roces, Bembol Roco, Yumi, Alan Paule, Carlo Aquino, Peggy Rico Tuazon, Lucky Mercado, Bong Villanueva, Ronnel Lintag, Star Ledesma, Jeremy Ian, Nasser Lubay, TJ dela Paz, Ricky Davao, Anita Linda, Ermie Concepcion, Armando A. Reyes, Divine Tetay, Angel Aquino, Paul Holmes, John Arkin Tan, Liza Diño, Brent Michael Borro
A man and woman in a motel room enact an excessive form of sadomasochistic activity. A separate couple, Xander and Mimi, have what appears to be a less unusual encounter, with Xander servicing Mimi for money; later Digos arrives and berates Xander, who’s been temporarily spirited from prison, for failing an assassination assignment. Aleks, who professionally dubs silent footage surreptitiously taken of couples in motel rooms, is teased by his female colleague and criticized by their employer for lacking in authenticity in his voice-overs; he nevertheless persists with his private webcam flirtations. Finally Alessandra (Alex for short), a star attraction in her workplace’s Follies de Mwah shows, has to figure out a way to interact with the upcoming birthday celebration of her estranged son, who hasn’t seen her since before her gender transition.
Although a 16mm. print of Celso Ad. Castillo’s Nympha (1971) might still be tracked to the inconsiderate borrower who failed to return it to the government film archive, it would be safe to conclude that no sample from the first era of pornographic film production (building up to the declaration by Ferdinand Marcos Sr. of martial law in 1972) can be accessed. A few titles fortunately remain from the next period, coinciding with the struggling years of the dictatorship through the early years after the people-power revolt in 1986. Porno though can be classed with a number of globally celebrated mindfucks, even if it doesn’t adhere to all the definitional requirements of the genre as spelled out in Linda Williams’s seminal volume Hard Core (1989). The multiversal chain of events invites diverse and conflictive readings—a result of deliberate asymmetrical and ambivalent plotting, per scriptwriter Ralston Jover (Facebook Messenger, March 9, 2025). The final episode, where the trans woman character’s nickname resembles that of the preceding episode’s sexually troubled young man, either can provoke a reconsideration of the film’s entire narratory design, or it can incite nothing more momentous than a shrug. Both responses would be equally appropriate for a film whose concern for the complications of sex work that contemporary working-class natives confront on a daily basis necessarily has to bypass the niceties of moral and anecdotal orderliness.
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Madilim ang Gabi
English Title: Dark Is the Night
Additional Language: Cebuano
Year of Release: 2017
Director & Screenwriter: Adolfo Alix Jr. [as Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr.]
Producers: Sound Investment Equity LLC, Deux Lux Mea Films, Oro de Siete Productions, Ukon Films, Swift Distribution
Cast: Phillip Salvador, Gina Alajar, Bembol Roco, Felix Roco, Jason Abalos, Archie Alemania, Angel Aquino, Angeli Bayani, Perla Bautista, Iza Calzado, Sebastian Castro, Manuel Chua, Alssandra de Rossi, Julio Diaz, Flora Gasser, Cherie Gil, Laurice Guillen, Ben Isaac, Angelina Kanapi, Kristoffer King, Anita Linda, William Lorenzo, Sid Lucero, Zanjoe Marudo, Jess Mendoza, Mikoy Morales, Kenken Nuyad, Kenneth Ocampo, Elizabeth Oropesa, Alan Paule, Ross Pesigan, Cherry Pie Picache, Rosanna Roces, Jeremy Sabido, Arvic Tan, Erlinda Villalobos, Cris Villonco, Kirst Viray
Sara, who functions as enforcer for Kidlat, the neighborhood drug lord, worries when the effects of the war of drugs declared by then-President Rodrigo Duterte result in the extrajudicial killing of several of her neighboring acquaintances. Her son Felix, a drug user, worries when he hears that his mother’s name is on a law-enforcement kill list. With her husband Lando, she pleads with Kidlat to be relieved of her designation and requests exemption from having to pay for their last batch of sachets of shabu or methamphetamine. Kidlat imposes a final assignment, which Sara attempts to bypass, but when Felix fails to return home, she and Lando contact the police force for help.
Cinéma vérité is better known among regular audiences as the practice of developing a film fiction around events as these unfold in real life. The French New Wave auteurs who popularized it actually drew from a documentarian, Jean Rouch, who made films in Africa. Not surprisingly, our major Second Golden Age practitioners took to the approach after it proved feasible in the New American Cinema. Celluloid production, however, was both too pricey and clunky to enable seamless integration of documentary footage with staged scenes. This in no way should diminish the triumph of Madilim ang Gabi, although it makes understandable how critical evaluators could believe that its bona fides are inadequate in relation to its predecessors, or that better samples will presently be presented. The timeline and locales cannot be denied: the film was made as soon as President Rodrigo Duterte declared and implemented his disastrous war on drugs, with the actors roaming the slums of Manila to be able to capture the authenticity of historical realities that appalled observers everywhere. The use of name actors even in minor roles becomes understandable in retrospect—authorities would think twice before harassing production activities that involved prestige performers, with Gina Alajar and Phillip Salvador retreading the doomed working-class characters they played in Lino Brocka’s Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim (My Country, 1984) but with a more realistic twist: as in the previous year’s war-on-drugs entry, Brillante Mendoza’s Ma’ Rosa, poverty implicates everyone in the state’s fascistic affirmations, whether they’re guilty of drug-trade involvement or not. MaG relies on an informed audience’s recollection of scene highlights from antiauthoritarian film-texts, and may be accused of drawing in possibly more then-current issues than the narrative could sustain. But its cinéma-vérité accomplishment abides and proves that we can look forward to more laudable attempts in the foreseeable future.
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