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Ang Nawawala

English Title: What Isn’t There
Year of Release: 2012
Director: Marie Jamora
Screenwriters: Marie Jamora & Ramon de Veyra
Producers: Brainchild Studios, Cinemalaya, National Commission for Culture and the Arts

Cast: Dominic Roco, Dawn Zulueta, Felix Roco, Boboy Garrovillo, Alchris Galura, Mercedes Cabral, Kelvin Yu, Jenny Zamora, Marc Abaya, Annicka Dolonius, Sabrina Man, Dayang Enriquez, Ethan Fabella, Leah Johnson, Boy Laguipo, Zarah Pagay, Sunshine Teodoro, Lianne Valentin, Joy Vargas

Traumatized when his twin brother had a fatal accident because of a dare he made, Gibson Bonifacio lapsed into silence, never speaking to anyone since then. He remained particularly wary of his mother, who openly preferred Jamie, his late brother. Things remained the same even after Gibson’s sojourn in the US, although unknown to anyone, Gibson maintains imaginary conversations with Jamie, who has also grown up along with him. His relations with himself, his family, and his friends come to a head when he falls for Enid, a pop musician who encourages him but later admits that she’s on the rebound from a breakup with another musician, for whom she still has some affection.

No other contemporary indie production has proved as divisive as Ang Nawawala, owing for the most part to its Fil-Am source. The controversy raised unfair expectations regarding its merits, although these were premised on mutually indefensible ideological differences. The film was denounced on the basis of two crucial properties: its acquiescence to mainstream values, as if a work on pop music could have justified high-art stylistics without courting the danger of pretension; and its focus on a milieu that did not foreground the sociological components of poverty. Its appreciators, also symptomatic of another type of affliction in Pinas film criticism, insistently rhapsodized over what they read as its celebration of bourgeois Americanized culture. Excepting these polarities, and now with the advantage of temporal distance, AN may be more properly considered for its critical take on precisely the culture that both sides misperceived and quarreled over. With a modest retinue of domestic helpers, the Bonifacio family members feel entitled enough to wallow in tragic errors that they sustain for years. It is Gibson’s relatively less-privileged intimates—his socially awkward brother-in-law, his independent-minded fling, and finally his decently discreet father—who provide him with motivations to work on his dysfunctional condition as well as his mother’s. Director Marie Jamora conveys these points without spelling them out (a liability for ideologically fixated evaluators, as it turned out), as well as by drawing out fully sympathetic and lived-in performances from Dominic Roco as Gibson and Dawn Zulueta as his mother, both of whom she tasked with delineating the least reasonable characters in the film.

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Amado Pagsanjan’s Asiong Salonga

Alternate Title: Asiong Salonga
Year of Release: 1961 / B&W
Director: Pablo Santiago
Screenwriter: Tommy C. David
(From a story serialized in Bulaklak magazine by Amado Pagsanjan)
Producer: Larry Santiago Productions

Cast: Joseph Estrada, Jose Padilla Jr., Yolanda Guevarra, Guia Gomez, Boy Francisco, Paquito Diaz, Vic Diaz, Vicente Liwanag, Dely Atay-Atayan, Jane Palomar, Nello Nayo, Francisco Cruz, Dencio Padilla, Arsenio Alonzo, Cleng-Cleng Diaz, Fred Ramirez, Bert Silva, Tony Santos

Nicasio Salonga, better known by his nickname Asiong, uses a combination of charm and propensity for violence to rise in the ranks of the most notorious gangs in the crime-ridden district of Tondo. Because of his notoriety, his elder brother has to give up his job as a police official while his mother dies during one of his incarcerations. He maintains a circle of mostly loyal followers and succeeds in courting Fidela and later convinces Emilia to be his mistress. A lesser-ranking hoodlum, Totoy Golem, starts out as a rival but eventually professes to be his friend and supporter while convincing Erning, one of Asiong’s malcontented and unruly recruits, to join his side.

Political democracy never wasted a bigger Philippine talent than it did Joseph Estrada. Newcomers to his screen record might be shocked to find, in the context of his era, a risk-taking performer with solid performative instincts with a willingness to depict the dregs of society—possibly the best we ever had in the action genre. His early starring roles, with Asiong Salonga comprising his star turn, were still free of the bad-boy mannerisms and intense-aspirated delivery that had already overtaken contemporaneous stars starting with Fernando Poe Jr. (The latter of course made his mark in other compensatory auteurist terms, starting with film production.) Erap’s later self-produced films took advantage of his rising political influence by focusing on personalities associated with the pre-1968 Communist armed movement, a productive mode that he gave up in exchange for the pursuit of presidential and local-government perks. The original cut of AS suffered from the excessive moralizing understandably imposed by society’s moral guardians, since the real-life model physically resembled Erap too closely and burned out far too quickly. Fortunately, the shortened version posted online by Solar Entertainment makes judicious use of fadeouts and a few jump cuts in the interest of cutting short several onscreen sermons and, in one case, a song number by Erap himself. The file still nears the two-hour mark anyway, an indicator of how incident-packed Salonga’s short life was (keep alert for Tony Santos’s reflexive cameo where he in effect passes on his bad-boy aura to Estrada via Salonga). The genre-studies principle that melodrama undergirds all the other genres, with the action movie as essentially melodrama for men, starts here before it proceeds to the rest of the the local action-film samples in the forthcoming decades.

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1—Pepeng Kaliwete

English Title: Left-Handed Pepe
Year of Release: 1982
Director: Pablo Santiago
Screenwriters: Fred Navarro & Alex M. Sunga
(Based on a character created by Alex M. Sunga)
Producer: FPJ Productions

Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Marianne de la Riva, Paquito Diaz, Rodolfo “Boy” Garcia, Anita Linda, Ruel Vernal, Victor Bravo, Vic Varrion, Nello Nayo, Robert Rivera, Amay Bisaya, Ken Metcalfe, Teody Belarmino, George Gyenes, Michael Pigar, Cesar Abejuela, Amy Anzures, Tony Carreon, Ernie David, Diog de Castro, Joe Estrada, Bert Garon, Eddie Gicoso, Romy Guarin, Benny May, Rony Montero, Bob Padilla, Wilson Red, Jimmy Reyes, Eddie Samonte, Thunder Stuntmen, Eddie Tuazon, Rudy Fernandez, Don Pepot

Pepe’s father plans to leave the hacienda in Del Pilar because of the owner’s avarice and cruelty, but gets gunned down in the presence of his wife and son. The owner entrusts Pepe to the care of Davis, a benign American caretaker who teaches Pepe how to clean and shoot a .45-caliber pistol. When Merill, the abusive American who killed Pepe’s father, brings over a female tenant to ravish, Pepe uses the pistol to warn him but winds up shooting Merill dead. Pepe and his mother flee to another town, where he grows up anonymously and acquires a reputation as a defender of the oppressed. His mother understands how he hankers to help the people in Del Pilar, so she tells him to do what his heart desires. Despite the scion of the hacienda owner still being as abusive as his father before him, the town mayor is genuinely people-oriented. Although presenting as a migrant worker, Pepe helps him get rid of corrupt police elements and expresses a desire to join the police force. The mayor instead appoints him chief, and he successfully woos Salud, the mayor’s niece; but when the landowner tries to win him over, Pepe declares himself on the side of the workers, earning the enmity of the haciendero.

2—Annie Sabungera

English Title: Annie the Cockfighter
Year of Release: 1982
Director: Pablo Santiago
Screenwriter: Tommy C. David
Producer: GPS Film Productions

Cast: Nora Aunor, Ace Vergel, Rey Valera, Marilou Bendigo, Nova Villa, Dencio Padilla, Chito Arceo, Amay Bisaya, Hero Bautista, Ramon D’Salva, Tony Santos, German Moreno, Tintoy, Dodong Gonzales, Protacio Dee, Angie Salinas, Richard King, Samson

Mang Intong has turned to gambling as a way of forgetting the sudden death of his wife. When he gets drunk, he loses his temper and beats up his daughter Annie, but expresses regret afterward. He teaches Annie the best way to raise gamecocks and she proves to be an adept trainee when she takes her father’s best rooster and wins a difficult round. Mang Intong’s excitement causes him to suffer a fatal heart attack in the cockpit. Like he did for his late wife, Annie devotes her life to cockfighting. Her father appears one night and tells her that he arranged to provide for her a sure winner. Following his instructions, she finds a new gamecock that speaks only to her, names him Samson, and sets out for Manila to try her luck. Her childhood friend, Domeng, carries a torch for her but has to stay behind to work. Annie’s triumph with Samson piques the interest of Randy, an apparently well-bred gentleman who’s really a henchman for a gambling lord. Randy’s boss takes an interest in Samson but Annie refuses to give up her father’s gift, so the boss asks Randy to help him trick Annie.

Although the nephew of one of the founders of Premiere Productions, Pablo Santiago succeeded in independent productions for his own outfit as well as for those of his cousins Cirio (famed for foreign coproductions) and Larry. More significantly, he specialized in projects that featured the biggest stars of their time—Fernando Poe Jr. and Joseph Estrada during the First Golden Age, and Nora Aunor and Vilma Santos during the Second. He might have been remembered for “developmentalist” projects such as Batingaw (Church Bell, 1974) or Kasal-Kasalan, Bahay-Bahayan (Playing Married, Playing House, 1979), or his later crossover assists between romantic-comedy and action performers; but in one propitious year he accepted assignments for Poe and Aunor that allowed him to foreground the skills and ease he accumulated in over a quarter-century of commercial practice. Pepeng Kaliwete had FPJ embarking on his usual role as champion of the oppressed, treading the same ground as the raved-over Sakada (Sugar-Plantation Migrant Workers, dir. Behn Cervantes, 1976).[1] Its observations of backbreaking labor and dehumanizing treatment are on the mark, although certain concessions to the power structure, notably in depicting a sympathetic local-government official and a persecuted American, threaten to upend its leftist leanings. Fortunately, FPJ himself knew when he had to minimize his crowd-pleasing antics in order to allow the interests of the populace to be filtered through his persona, and comes close to violating the taboo against allowing his character to die, although only in a symbolic sense. Annie Sabungera is an even further throwback, to an era when fantastic developments were allowed to intervene in a lead character’s material predicaments. The real miracle lay in Aunor’s resolve to play the proceedings straight, layering her performance with the same set of superior performative skills that she brought to her prestige projects;[2] this had always been her approach throughout her career, but one only has to inspect any other local actor of equal or lesser status to find how exceptional her achievement was. The buildup to an unexpectedly devastating resolution, where social corruption prevails over supernatural powers, requires a complex of conflicting responses that would have defeated most capable actors. Aunor’s description of her fallow moments as a consequence of downgrading by film critics who should have known better, only revealed how impossible it was for them to fulfill their worst expectations of her. [Tech note: existing video transfers of Annie Sabungera suffer from an unacceptable cropping of the right portion of the screen, in addition to the usual degraded surface.]

Notes

[1] Another film with exactly the same title was made in 1958 and produced by Premiere Productions, Fernando Poe Jr.’s home studio. Apparently so-far unrecovered, it starred Poe but featured an entirely different set of actors, under the direction of Cirio H. Santiago, from a script by Augusto Buenaventura based on Alex Manansala’s Bulaklak serialization. Paradoxically, it’s the personal FPJ production that’s more overtly political, its story sourced from material by Alex M. Sunga, a progressive industry figure.

[2] Appropriately enough, the first time cockfighting was documented by a Westerner was when Antonio Pigafetta observed the sport upon arriving in what is now the Philippines, in Relazione del primo viaggio intorno al mondo (An Account of the First Voyage Around the World), his 1525 chronicle of Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage; even the subsequent film-crazed colonizers came up with a B-movie entry, Gus Trikonis’s Supercock (a.k.a. Fowl Play, 1975), where an apple-pie wholesome American brings over Friendly, a white rooster, to compete with the top-performing jungle fowls of a family of gangsters and participates in an endless series of phallic double-entrendres. A contemporary cockfight specialist who recollected the films he had seen, took exception with Annie Sabungera’s fantasy elements, but nevertheless observed how the film had “a considerable amount of sabong vocabulary employed as well as some handling and conditioning techniques”—see Rolando S. Luzong, “Finally, a New Sabong Movie in the Making,” Animal Scene Magazine (supplement of Manila Bulletin), March 2009 issue.

11011The film referenced in the article title was Rozie Delgado & Miguel Kaimo’s Sabungero (The Cockfighter, 2009), although a more recent release, Bryan Kristoffer Brazil’s Lost Sabungeros (2024), has become an unusual cause célèbre because of its civic significance: produced by GMA Public Affairs, the documentary raised questions about the abduction and disappearance of thirty cockfighters whose interests conflicted with those of politically connected gambling lords. Possible intertextual predecessors of Annie Sabungera, both of which feature talking gamecocks, would be Joe Macachor’s Ang Manok ni San Pedro (St. Peter’s Rooster), the first Cebuano-language color film, shot in 1977 in super-8mm.; and Armando Garces’s Texas (Ang Manok na Nagsasalita, or The Talking Rooster, 1952), from a komiks serial by Mars Ravelo. One final observation about the Pablo Santiago film, never made anywhere, might be historical in nature, inasmuch as the backstory of Annie’s father resembles the real-life narrative of Gregorio Fernandez, a major First Golden Age director-actor (also represented in Canon Decampment): the death of his wife apparently led to his eventual abandonment of career and family, fostering a new vocation as champion cockfighter in his hometown of Lubao, Pampanga.

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Di Ingon ’Nato

English Title: Not Like Us
Language: Cebuano
Year of Release: 2011
Directors & Screenwriters: Brandon Relucio & Ivan Zaldarriaga
Producer: Cinema One Originals

Cast: Rez Cortez, Franco Reyes, Mercedes Cabral, Donna Gimeno, Jeffrey Ogario, Gabriel Jon Abanto, Gregg Tecson, Marlon Hofer, Bernard Catindig, Aya Ng, Nathaniel Rubio, Cara Muaña Rosende, Ria Araneta, Lito Cardeño, Daday Melgar, Joe Monteño, Ligaya Rabago, Vingenr Tan, Lord Padua, Diane, Mata, Rita Sabal, Ronyel Compra, Dodong, Fatima Padua, Aurora Pacure

Lauro, the captain of a remote barangay or village in Cebu Province, is alerted by some of his constituents to a deadly infectious outbreak, tracked from mysterious instances of residents or outsiders getting killed in apparently violent ways. His daughter, who works as medic in the barangay health center, is able to determine that the diseased return to life after they die and acquire a hankering for human flesh. A priest and a pagan healer contend in having the right explanation (and consequent solution) for the phenomenon, but their use of magic doesn’t stop the illness from spreading. In a parallel development, Istoy, a farmer, sees one such hacked-up body. When his wife is attacked by a neighbor, he uses his bolo to kill the assailant. His wife worries that he committed a crime, but he becomes more anxious when her condition rapidly deteriorates.

The zombie-apocalypse subgenre is so overfamiliar that one could already predict how its elements of contagion and consequent social breakdown could function in any sample. But Di Ingon ’Nato’s impoverished agricultural context provides a resonance that compatriots and invaders alike might do well to learn from: “Filipino farmers hacking the undead,” as co-director Ivan Zaldarriega half-jokingly stated in a journal interview with genre specialist Andrew Leavold. Beyond the admittedly distressing representation of the repressed, historical incidents after the film’s release added retrospective value on stations both national (the practice of extrajudicial killings during the authoritarian regime of a Visayan President) and international (the intensification of the global Covid-19 pandemic). A narrative that turns on unstoppable contagion that results in widespread and arbitrary casualties would be hampered by severely constricted budgetary resources, a problem that DIN, alongside countless other indie productions, confronted. The filmmakers atypically resolved this quandary by taking advantage of their limitations: minimizing the casting of professional performers, shooting in remote locales, apportioning the use of gore in judiciously effective closeups, furnishing sound effects for subtle and well-timed blasts. Along with a few careful strokes at character development, the effect curiously results in an embrace of the monstrous—more pronounced than in the usual zombie-apocalypse outing. With the possibly permanent loss of what may be Philippine cinema’s supreme zombie film, Celso Ad. Castillo’s Kung Bakit Dugo ang Kulay ng Gabi (Night of the Zombies, 1973), DIN compensates satisfactorily enough; the fact that both are set in rural locales, as are several other horror entries in this list, could have made for productive analysis if the Castillo film could be recovered and considered as the others’ predecessor.

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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 can 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) craze 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

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 (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 on 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 thespians 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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Midnight in a Perfect World

Year of Release: 2020
Director & Screenwriter: Dodo Dayao
(From a story by Dodo Dayao & Carljoe Javier)
Producers: Globe Studios & Epicmedia Productions

Cast: Jasmine Curtis-Smith, Glaiza de Castro, Anthony Falcon, Dino Pastrano, Bing Pimentel, Soliman Cruz, Dolly de Leon, Charles Aaron Salazar, Brian Sy, Aljhon Agnila, Nate Agustin, Rolly Catchuela, Elmar Flores, Timmy Harn, Patti Lapus, Joey Pinera, Jerico Ramota, Veronica Reyes, Jeriko Tan, Hank Valentine

In an unspecified future that still resembles the present, when the country has attained a level of developmental sanguinity, four friends decide to venture outdoors despite the possibility of a localized midnight blackout and their awareness that a mutual acquaintance has disappeared. They go to a club to score a new kind of powerful hallucinogenic drug but after their seller is killed, they leave the place. A power outage causes them to panic and they run along with a crowd of strangers fleeing from a death squad. One of them, Tonichi, knows of a safehouse where they could hide; but when they arrive, they realize he’s no longer with them. His panicked phone calls make them realize he’s lost. As they attempt to figure out their hiding place, they meet Alma, an older lady who says she’d already been to two other safehouses. They plan to go outdoors to save Tonichi but then Glenn gets left behind. Mimi and Jinka have to rely on each other for survival, not just from the death squad but also from a monster that lurks in the darkness.

Midnight in a Perfect World embodies the exception that proves the rule: that independent cinema should not necessarily be valorized just for existing, or else it raises the vexed predicament of dismissing a mainstream that had proved capable of containing great work in the past. It sets up the challenge of working in sci fi-horror, a generic hybrid routinely associated with developed economies because of its technological assumptions. What an adequately exposed practitioner like Dodo Dayao has figured out from existing samples provides the key for his audacious approach: that, on a certain level, the social impact of late capital does not differ much from one culture or period to another. The spaces, services, and law-enforcement policies for underclass citizens will be recognizable to anyone whose political sensibilities are sufficiently rooted in the here and now. From this point moving forward, the apparent limits of indigent production get transformed into useful resources, with darkness, squalor, inhospitable outdoors and constrictive indoors, and barely adequate hardware serving to intensify the atmospherics of fear. The attentive readings of an age-grouped collection of responsive performers draw us into a series of geographical and narrative culs-de-sac, while the seemingly unrelated prelude initiates the slasher structure that more or less gets observed along the way; the standard global-indie earnest demonization of lumpen characters that marred his debut feature has also apparently decamped for now. Once we realize that the confusion—of the characters and therefrom the audience—becomes an essential component of the presentation’s promise of pleasure, we’re well on our way.

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Bambanti

English Title: Scarecrow
Additional Language: Pangasinan
Year of Release: 2015
Director & Screenwriter: Zig Madamba Dulay
Producers: Sinag Maynila, Solar Entertainment, Center Stage Productions

Cast: Alessandra de Rossi, Shamaine Buencamino, Micko Laurente, Julio Diaz, Delphine Buencamino, Lui Manansala, Erlinda Villalobos, Celio Aquino, Kiki Baento, Abegail Edillo, Jillian Pearl Paraggua, Noli Tamayo, Cristina Agustin, Ofelia Utanes, Verna Riza Agonoy, Santiago Norberte, Ligaya Rivera, Jeffrey Rivera, Angeles Reginaldo, Helson Cadiz, Jerival Guanco

After her husband was killed by unidentified assassins, Belyn performs laundry tasks for her better-off sister-in-law Martha, in order to continue the elementary education of her two children and nurse the youngest. She takes her son Popoy along with her because she can count on his intelligence to help her. One day, however, Martha realizes that her teen daughter’s expensive watch is missing. A fortuneteller says that a boy and his mother took it, so she queries Popoy, who denies committing the theft. Martha files a complaint with the village officials and the townfolk begin to turn on mother and son.

Zig Madamba Dulay’s extensive practice in film storytelling has prepared him for the standard low-budget exercise on which Bambanti is premised. Proceeding like any typical indie production, the film draws its strength from the delivery of its narrative’s central trio of mother, son, and sister-in-law. Dulay’s point of departure, however, lies in allowing the familial and community players to enact their roles as concerned bystanders without casting aspersions on any of them, in contrast with the way that several contemporaneous entries succeeded with the local elite and even foreign markets by indulging in the victim-centered demonization of Manila’s Others. So the film’s plot twists, when they arrive, prove as much surprising to the attentive viewer as they do to the characters, and underline the insight that so much potential in this type of material has been wasted in the past because of the essentially exploitative approach of filmmakers who wished to impress their colleagues and superiors at the expense of the hapless folk they trained their equipment on.

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1—#WalangForever

English Translation: #NoForever
Year of Release: 2015
Director: Dan Villegas
Screenwriter: Paul Sta. Ana
Producers: Quantum Films, MJM Productions, Tuko Film Productions

Cast: Jericho Rosales, Jennylyn Mercado, Lorna Tolentino, Pepe Herrera, Kim Molina, Jerald Napoles, Myke Salomon, Sarah Pagcaliwagan, Patrick Sugui, Nico Antonio, Juan Miguel Severo, Sebastian Castro, Irma Adlawan, Rustica Carpio, Matet de Leon, Paolo O’Hara, Quark Henares, Lilit Reyes, Geraldine Villamil, Phoemala Baranda, Cai Cortez, Phi Palmos, Derek Ramsey, Maja Salvador, Yves Flores, Alyana Asistio, Jon Lucas, Michelle Vito, Julian Estrada, Jason Francisco, Melai Cantiveros, Khalil Ramos, Jane Oineza, Sid Lucero, Liza Diño, Star Orjaliza, Francis Grengia, Ebe Dancel, Miguel Faustmann, Bianca Balbuena, Mackie Galvez, Matt Daclan, Cathy Garcia-Samana, Nonoy Froilan, Edna Vida, Carlo Aquino

Mia Nolasco’s a successful scriptwriter of romantic comedy films, although her latest works were box-office disappointments. In a TV interview, she confesses that she lost her inspiration when she broke up with the man she thought she could share the rest of her life with. As proof of the accuracy of her statements, we see scenes from the films she wrote alongside the actual events she experienced. Her ex, Ethan Isaac, resented her for prioritizing her career, even refusing to travel with him to Taiwan to meet his overseas-based mother for that reason. When he returns, he accidentally meets Mia in a bookstore and realizes that his life will never be complete without her. At the same time, he seeks second opinions not about his relationship, but about his health.

2—How to Be Yours

Additional Language: Cebuano
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Dan Villegas
Screenwriters: Patrick Valencia & Hyro Aguinaldo
(Based on a story by Dan Villegas)
Producers: Star Cinema & Viva Films

Cast: Bea Alonzo, Gerald Anderson, Bernard Palanca, Janus del Prado, Alex Medina, Anna Luna, Nicco Manalo, Jerome Tan, Divine Aucina, Cheska Iñigo, Brian Sy, Teetin Villanueva, Lito Pimentel, Katya Santos, Ricardo Cepeda, Ana Roces, Chkristopher Tan, Marnie Lapus, Geraldine Villamil, Fredison Lo, Alexander Soriano, Evelyn Santos, James Christie, JC Movido

On a night out in Chinatown during Spring Festival with friends from work, Niño notices Angeline Mendoza (Anj for short) and makes her acquaintance. She also finds him attractive and invites him to spend the night at her place, but her roommates make too much noise for them to have an intimate moment. In the morning, Anj introduces Niño to her friends and they invite him to the food stall where she practices her cooking skills; she tells him that she’s the only member of her family who didn’t become a doctor so cooking’s her way of finding fulfillment in something she enjoys doing. One time, Pocholo, a famous chef, tries a dish prepared by Anj and is impressed enough to invite her to apply to his restaurant. She gets accepted but the work demands so much time from her that Niño decides to invite her to live with him so she can commute more easily to her job. She devotes herself to her job so assiduously that Pocholo appoints her his sous-chef; but since investors for a new restaurant that Anj can run are nervous because of her lack of extensive experience, he offers to send her to Paris for further training—a prospect that further strains her relationship with Niño.

The now-expended period of dominance of the romantic-comedy film genre in the Philippines might be good news for the high-brow critics who claimed concern for the mass audience’s cultural well-being yet hypocritically denounced whatever mode of presentation happened to draw their attention at any historical moment. A vital component of the trend that set it apart from its Classical Hollywood origin was that millennium-era Pinas romcom production was by and large female-dominated, with women and gay-male directors attending to the creative side of specific projects, including the occasional comedy byproduct. (One way of getting a handle on the homegrown expressions of incommensurate anti-romcom hatred is by recalling the conservative backlash in the US against disco music, for its having been essentially a synergism that brought together black producers, women singers, and gay appreciators.) Romcom had flourished so overwhelmingly that it enabled the emergence of talents who could fill any perceived lacks by resisting or even overturning some of its generic premises. The case of Dan Villegas holds special significance in this context: by providing an identifiable and credible straight-male perspective within the feminist terms of the genre, his output helps explain how romcom films could attract such a broad viewership sector. #WalangForever went about its proof of concept by resorting to an admittedly old-fashioned strategy: invest the male partner with a tragic circumstance so extreme that it inhibits him from pursuing romantic fulfillment. The film provides a reflexive device by having the more successful woman partner turning their story into public spectacles—an undeniably creepy choice if it were perpetrated by a man, but it somehow earns its druthers by ultimately enabling the doubt-ridden man to witness, as the audience does, how his lover was processing their affair. How to Be Yours can also be solidly situated in this dynamic: it allows its primarily female character to dictate the terms of her relationship (as any of her real-life counterparts would), but in finding a narrative equivalent of Pinay citizens’ overseas-labor designations, it manages to refocus some attention on the left-behind chap, contriving to reconstruct a life that had already fully burgeoned in the presence of someone who’s no longer around. The depiction of men coping with loss was one of the standard highlights of the best local action films, as was the imaging of women commanded by love—and such are the means by which genre developments address audience concerns regardless of the narrative mechanisms they utilize.

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Hintayan ng Langit

English Title: Heaven’s Waiting
Year of Release: 2018
Director: Dan Villegas
Screenwriter: Juan Miguel Silverio
(Based on his one-act play)
Producers: QCinema International Film Festival, Globe Studios, Quezon City Film Development Commission

Cast: Eddie Garcia, Gina Pareño, Kat Galang, Joel Saracho, Mary Joy Apostol, Jomari Angeles, Geraldine Villamil, Dolly de Leon, Francis Mata, Karl Medina, Che Ramos, Mel Kimura, Reynald Raissel Santos, Errine Danan, Neil Guillen, Martin Lazaro, Hadaneeah Cubico, Monina Fe Meraces, Jonel Pusing, Miguel Mascareñas, Nina Ybanez, Miko Yu, Angelica Tapia, Elizabeth dela Cerna

Upon his arrival, Manolo’s informed by the halfway place’s concierge that the room allotted to him has been damaged, so he’ll have to share sleeping quarters with someone he used to know. He finds out that it’s Lisang, who used to be his girlfriend before he married someone else several decades ago. After remembering how he died, he figures out that he’s in Purgatory, awaiting a final trip to a higher realm along with the other residents. What he wonders about is why Lisang keeps delaying her own ascent, even committing an infraction in his presence.

Hintayan ng Langit would literally translate as “heaven’s waiting room,” so the idea of Purgatory, problematic even to enlightened Catholics, serves as the closest possible equivalent of the concept of a way station in the afterlife where the recently deceased could resolve their personal issues before attaining a state of eternal peace and happiness. Those with enough historical awareness might also recall that colonial-era Spanish clergy earned for the local church incalculable wealth and property based on instilling the fear of purgatorial suffering on vulnerable wealthy natives, in order to claim their inheritance right before they expired. The challenge for the filmmakers therefore lay in selling the fantasy—which the narrative unexpectedly performs by fusing classical values with a covert modern sensibility. Traditionalists will have to be inordinately picky to find fault with HnL’s visual design as well as the first-time pairing of two studio-era old-timers known for both their consummate skills and their willingness to tackle daring roles: their extended exchanges and individual monologues are reserved for the film’s climactic section, and unsurprisingly they make it worth the trouble. The modern element, in terms of Hollywood samples, requires a recollection of which American film came closest to HnL’s example. In general, US productions could not resist resending their dead characters back to the real world, so even in these terms, HnL remains distinctive; but the first American film to focus on a woman’s post-life predicament was Gerard Damiano’s The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), arguably the first undisputed masterpiece of the Golden Age of Porn.[1] It shouldn’t be too surprising that what was so unusual for Americans that it could only be initially made on the fringes of their industry became standard fare for Pinas cinema in the late twentieth century, after the collapse of the country’s authoritarian adventure.

Note

[1] The title once appeared in the decadal Sight & Sound survey of 2002; I was the respondent who entered it, along with another X-rated title, The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Radley Metzger a.k.a. Henry Paris, 1976).

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The Day After Valentine’s

Additional Languages: Hawaiian & Baybayin (written)
Year of Release: 2018
Director & Screenwriter: Jason Paul Laxamana
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Bela Padilla, JC Santos, Regine Tolentino, Jordan Castillo, Stacey Gabriel, Phoebe Villamor, Rayton Lamay, Hermie Go, Merwyn Abel, Aries Go, Rhedz Turner, Don Michael Roxas, Easy Ferrero, Ianne Oandasan, Lars Magbanua, Maverick Manalang

Lani, a salesperson at an ukay-ukay or secondhand clothes shop in Angeles City, proceeds to assist a customer, Kai, after she realizes he needs to buy arm sleeves to hide the scars of the self-harm he committed. He tells her that he decided to remain in the country after his family returned to the US, because of a woman he had fallen in love with but who broke up with him afterward. Following psychological advice she learned, Lani realizes she could use the native writing system, which Kai’s ex had taught him, to help him heal. Grateful for her intervention, Kai invites Lani to his home on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, where their relationship tenses up and raises questions for both of them.

The travelogue romcom was bound to reach a level of maturity despite the antimainstream misgivings of local critics, partly because of the persistence of expert practitioners, but also because of the still-expanding overseas Filipino population and their wealth of still-to-be-tapped stories. The Day After Valentine’s exemplifies new potentials in the format, focusing on the first generation of overseas migrants—kids who could still return to their parents’ country of origin and find enough familiarity to be able to thrive by themselves. It also makes use of a cis-het partnership that may be the most satisfactory in Pinas film culture, both partners being equally matched in terms of appeal, intelligence, and chemistry. Their maturity (relative to the usual teenage age-group of local movie love teams) ensures that their teamups won’t generate hysterical responses, but that also enables their projects’ creatives to focus on discursive issues that can guarantee longer-term satisfaction. The manner in which TDAV steps beyond romcom territory and transforms into social-problem drama may be so subtle that the realization might only arrive after the viewing experience. Whether we regard this type of innovation as useful or insignificant, the fact of its availability should be justification enough.

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Ded Na si Lolo

English Title: Grandpa Is Dead
Year of Release: 2009
Director & Screenwriter: Soxy Topacio [as Soxie Hernandez Topacio]
Producers: APT Entertainment, Directors Guild of the Philippines, Sine Direk

Cast: Roderick Paulate, Gina Alajar, Elizabeth Oropesa, Manilyn Reynes, Dick Israel, Perla Bautista, Rainier Castillo, BJ Forbes, Tony Cruz, Richard Quan, Mosang, Froilan Sales, Phil Noble, Diego Llorico, Rhen Escaño, Karylle Quijano, Dave Cervantes, Arpee Bautista, Perry Escaño, Richard Jason Paje, Rudy Meyer, Manny Castañeda, Cesar Cosme, Mike “Pekto” Nacua, John Feir, Gene Padilla, Deborah Sun, Gigette Reyes, Noel Cabangon, Jess Evardone, Nor Domingo, Edel Templonuevo

Lolo Juanito fails to wake up one morning. After his body is returned from the morgue, his grownup children have to gather together at his house for his wake and burial. They all resent Dolores, their eldest, for being the least affectionate sibling. Mameng and Charing bring their families to help out, while estranged son Junee arrives straight from a drag program. Finally the older son, Syano, brings a stranger to the funeral and makes the others realize they never really knew their parents that well after all.

Ded Na si Lolo underwent a trajectory of being overrated, then underrated; but in the period since its release, it deserves to be regarded as a fitting tribute to the highly regarded talents of Philippine Educational Theater Association stalwart Soxy Topacio. The narrative situation indicates an intimate familiarity not just with the score of performers in theater and TV that he worked with, but also with the reality of growing up in an urban working-class milieu. The plot would have challenged most film-trained directors, with characters who keep giving vent to their anguish, with dramatic fainting as one of the family’s quirks. Nosy neighbors and importunate superstitions, usually depicted as annoyances if not obstacles in local cinema, are presented with bemusement and acceptance of their inevitability. The narrative builds up to a quietly devastating final-act revelation, heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure, that evinces the kind of presence we lost with Topacio’s sudden demise.

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