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Huling Balyan ng Buhi o ang Sinalirap nga Asoy Nila

Alternate Title: Huling Balyan ng Buhi
English Title: The Last Priestess of Buhi or the Woven Stories of the Other
English Translation of Alternate Title: Last Shaman of Life
Language: Cebuano
Year of Release: 2006
Director & Screenwriter: Sherad Anthony Sanchez
Producers: Cinema One Originals, Salida Davao, Alchemy of Vision and Light, Loyola Film Circle, North Cotabato Provincial Government

Cast: Jelieta Mariveles-Ruca, Marilyn Roque, Jun Lizada, Manay, Ronald Arguelles, Connie Bordios, and Barangay Napalico, Arakan Valley, North Cotabato

The balyan or shaman of a small rural town in Mindanao traverses her native territory as well as that of an army camp; she complains about the soldiers’ presence but they regard her as an eccentric person, affirmed by her advanced age, malformed body, and bleeding hands, occasionally offering young boys a glimpse of her pussy in exchange for money. She complains about her treatment to Jun, one of the soldiers, who is infatuated with Valerie and keeps asking about her, while the rest of the men bond over so-called boodle fights or communal eating with hands, open-air basketball games, and drinking sessions where they imbibe tubâ or palm wine. Unknown to them, a band of rebels has set up camp just outside the town, nursing a wounded comrade, attending indoctrination lectures, and singing revolutionary anthems. Two of them quarrel by a river where a lady emerges; they don’t seem to see her but their anger is appeased. One of the rebels later discharges his rifle accidentally and kills their wounded comrade; he flees the camp and returns to his residence in the town. When the balyan bleeds out and is in danger of dying, two of the soldiers carry her in a hammock. Their paths are about to cross that of the rebels, who’re transferring camp; a kid they ask for directions runs away to warn the other side.

Huling Balyan ng Buhi was welcomed as the film that set the template for millennial-era regional cinema in the Philippines, signaling a clean break from the genre-oriented and star-driven orientation of past practitioners. Remarkably, digital production was just about to entirely supplant celluloid production in the country, with director Sherad Anthony Sanchez developing a workable system out of an annual film festival’s subsidy: by locating production activity far from the capital area, he was able to devise a narrative with epic elements that would have required a beyond-average budget for a Manila celluloid project. The fact that nearly all the other independent productions boast of this potential today should not detract from the guts that HBnB’s emergence required, which was why most knowledgeable reviews began with a recounting of the circumstances of its origin; even Eloisa May P. Hernandez’s Digital Cinema in the Philippines, 1999–2009 (University of the Philippines Press, 2014) acknowledged HBnB as the originator of digital-indie practice in the country. Like several of his colleagues, Sanchez never stood idly by until the opportunity came along. Proof lay in the complex narrative and stylistic approach he lavished on the undertaking, with a humanist orientation (per his confirmation) deployed as his means of upholding the Mindanao natives caught in the figurative crossfire between army combatants and rebel fighters. The former necessarily come across in more idealized terms, since they function openly, unafraid of displays of playfulness and bonding, with the townspeople as their audience. It is the guerrillas, however, who exhibit dramatic turns one after another, including the narrative’s singular supernatural event. Sanchez’s refusal to resolve the tension between the two groups enables the focus on the town’s Others, specifically the balyan and two forest-dwelling orphans, to raise the open-ending query of what their fates might be. Not everyone will be satisfied with such a treatment, but then the parallels with Philippine history will yield the same type of frustration in the end.

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Jungle Love

Additional Language: Hiligaynon
Year of Release: 2012
Director & Screenwriter: Sherad Anthony Sanchez
Producers: Salida Productions, Gaps Philippines, Brass Knuckles Productions

Cast: Gloria Morales, Mae Bastes, Martin Riffer, Edgardo Amar, Aldrin Sapitan, Edgardo Amar, Melbert Pangilinan, John Grino, John Paul Fernandez, Aryid Abes, Jay-Ar Abes, Janice Fernandez, Melvil Gonzales, “the people of Minalungao”

[Note: spoilers provided] An elderly woman attempts to seduce her brother-in-law but he refuses. She leaves, taking her infant nephew with her. She then rides a bus, where the passengers are all wearing the same pig masks. Somewhere else, an urbanized young adult male masturbates and asks Mae, his girlfriend, about getting high. She refuses his attempts to have kinky sex, saying that it’s not her preference. He then encourages her to seduce their native guide, whom he describes as ugly. Anonymous naked women march in the forest, while soldiers jog on the road. Mae and her BF trek with their guide through the forest while the mother who fled with the baby walks down a creek and leaves it in a shady grove. It disappears when she returns and she panics. The soldiers’ marching band plays by a convenience store but the owner tells them that without payment, they don’t get freebies. The soldiers then jog backward up the road. As the exploring party lounges, Mae asks her BF for his shades while their guide looks over a map on a tablet so he can take them to a tribe. Mae mounts the guide playfully, then the latter walks on the mountainside, where anonymous men show up as part of the landscape and where the missing baby reappears. Mae and her partner make out in a hidden part of the forest. The guide goes over the map on his tablet, the last destination he traces being Balungao (in Pangasinan province). The mother who lost her baby enters a cave in the mountain. Mae wakes up and notices the guide jacking off to her. The boyfriend attempts to rape her but she leaves him. The guide then walks by some soldiers frolicking in the river. The mother awakens and sees forest spirits. Mae and her BF hump in the forest, but after they finish he’s appalled as she transforms into the old woman in the beginning, and he strangles her. A young soldier bathing in the river asks Mae, in Hiligaynon language, to join him. The guide sees the old lady, who flees, then finds her on the forest floor and rifles through her bag. The woman cries but the guide brings her baby to her as men walk through the forest darkness. A DJ on an unseen radio tells his listeners not to give up. Mae passes by native women dancing as she meets the guide and seduces him. Afterward the guide goes to the edge of a cliff, shouts, undresses, and leaps off. The woman with a baby talks softly to the child under a grotesque giant tree. Forest nymphs, all half-naked women, stand around. A soldier enters a near-empty barracks and addresses Amar, who then plays an online adventure game with him. The woman with the baby runs on the side of the mountain. The woman cries and her face is frozen in black and white, while the Hiligaynon-speaking soldier continues pleading with an unseen person he calls Miss. The same soldier re-emerges on the forest floor, stark naked, and climaxes. He later enthusiastically leads the marching band. A man’s voice calls out for certain people—Aldrin, Martin Gloria, Mae. The radio DJ then identifies himself as Francis Pasion and thanks donors on the air.

Possibly the only local film, though definitely not the only Filipino, to win an overseas prize for pornographic excellence, Jungle Love also deserves specialized recognition as the country’s most successful sample of an experimental film narrative. The full storyline is provided here, but as anyone familiar with any experimental format already knows, reading will never suffice as a substitute for the viewing experience. Some creative sleuthing might also come in handy, since JL has become scarce since its year of release, supposedly owing to the reticence of its performers. The surprising turn that Sherad Anthony Sanchez’s creative inspiration took can still be tracked from a few surreal touches in his first full-length feature, Huling Balyan ng Buhi (2006), through a resolutely anticommercial Imburnal (Sewer, 2008), both of which were admired by organized critics; but JL is sui generis and bears comparison with only a few rare samples, and is capable of standing tall even beside these. A measure of Sanchez’s confidence is the several instances of jokiness in JL, including an insistent repetition of the same song, an adaptation of the cheesy religious pop number “God Bless You, Mama Mary Loves You” (composed by Fatima Soriano and Jerry M. Orbos, 2006), with defiantly antiwoke messaging targeting feminists, queers, the elderly, and the infirm, among several others. The same ambivalent imaging of army personnel he provided in HBnB is carried over, with results that can be described as more intense: a young officer ejaculates on-cam (without masturbating, strangely), then turns into the happiest baton-twirler you might be able to find anywhere. It doesn’t make sense—nothing does, which is the point of the exercise; the not-making-sense also makes complete sense, and affirms Sanchez’s stature, alongside a growing number of non-Manila talents, as a major Philippine film treasure.

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Kailangan Kita

English Translation: I Need You
Additional Language: Bicolano
Year of Release: 2002
Director: Rory B. Quintos
Screenwriters: Shaira Mella Salvador & Moira Lang
(From a story by Shaira Mella Salvador, Moira Lang, Emmanuel Dela Cruz)
Producer: Star Cinema

Cast: Aga Muhlach, Claudine Barretto, Johnny Delgado, Liza Lorena, Jericho Rosales, Dante Rivero, Cholo Escaño, Nicole Judalena, Igi Boy Flores, Cris Villanueva, Rissa Mananquil, Gerald Madrid, Ces Quesada, Madeleine Nicolas, Jon Achaval, Fonz Deza, Farrah Florer, Jessette Prospero, Albert Zialcita, Randy Gamier, Idda Yaneza, Edgardo Pascua, Cyrus Balinguit, Rocky Martinez, Morten Bremelhoej, Florante Tagulo, Carl Rosales, Anthony Ranguani, Lowell Conales, Rheylord Camacho

Carl Diesta, a successful chef in the US, goes to his bride-to-be Giselle Duran’s Bicol hometown to help prepare for their forthcoming wedding. Giselle however keeps finding reasons to delay her arrival while Carl observes that her sister Lena shares his passion for food and extends a hand to insurgent fighters, despite the objection of Carl and her family. Carl realizes that Lena had to break up with the man she loved after he joined the rebel army. She convinces him to relish spicy preparations in coconut milk, a specialty of Bicol cuisine which he initially resisted. As Carl starts doubting whether marrying Giselle was a wise decision, Lena tells him that she knows the town’s best cook of laing (taro leaves cooked in coconut milk) and takes him to the old man’s hut. Carl realizes that the cook was someone he knew in the past, before he moved abroad.

The reality of Filipinos returning from overseas sojourns has always been a source of vital narratives on national identity and global engagement, ever since the native ilustrados of the nineteenth century brought over the Enlightenment ideals that Spanish colonizers strove to keep at bay from the native population. The Philippines’s long-enduring labor-export policy has made the influx of returnees, whether staying temporarily or for good, a permanent certainty in the country’s national imaginary. The reality has become so commonplace that Star Cinema, which once had to depict a Philippine character in a foreign setting in Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s May Nagmamahal sa Iyo (Madonna and Child, 1996) to affirm her status as an Overseas Filipino Worker returnee, could now endow a character with enough foreign-voyage markers and occasional long-distance phone calls to establish the authenticity of said character’s alienation from local cultural phenomena. Kailangan Kita coasts along satisfactorily enough on its lead male character’s classically inflected dilemma—the way that, say, Newland Archer realizes that Countess Ellen Olenska incites his nostalgic imagination more than his betrothed does in The Age of Innocence (1920 novel by Edith Wharton, 1993 film by Martin Scorsese). But the net it casts is woven from sturdier fabric than the usual flimsy premises of popular romances. The incursion of an insurgent movement, whose origin can be tracked to the country’s anticolonial revolutionaries, is only the first of a series of direct challenges to the central family’s conflictive existence. Other prognosticators of even more inescapable social shifts show up, sometimes without warning, necessitating in one instance a generational conciliation that could devastate unprepared viewers. The representation of nation is expertly divided between a rational, First World-residing male, and a subservient, neglected, but constantly appraising daughter; KK decisively triumphs in its casting of Claudine Barretto in peak form, as a woman resigned to her own fate who yet realizes self-fulfillment in clandestine relationships that she maintains with as much discretion as she can get away with.

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Babe, I Love You

Year of Release: 2010
Director: Mae Cruz-Alviar [as Mae Czarina Cruz]
Screenwriters: Mia Bacarro, Margarette Labrador Garcia, King Palisoc, Ricardo Fernando III, Generiza F. Reyes
(From a story by Mia Bacarro, Margarette Labrador Garcia, King Palisoc)
Producers: ABS-CBN Film Productions, Viva Films, Star Cinema

Cast: Sam Milby, Anne Curtis, Laurice Gillen, Tetchie Agbayani, Lala Sanchez, Nikki Valdez, Kitkat, Guji Lorenzana, Niña Dolino, Leo Rialp, Ricardo Cepeda, Megan Young, AJ Perez, Shamaine Buencamino, Nicole Uysiuseng, Thou Reyes, Nikki Bacolod, Angel Sy, CJ Jaravata, Roden Araneta, Cheska Ortega, Justin Gonzales, Maritess Joaquin, Jessette Prospero, Gigi Locsin, Antonio Roma, Aloysius Noroña, Marion dela Cruz, Jose Sarasola, Jaypee Aveyro, Martin Silverio, Tim Dewitt, Chris Racuber, Brian Hills, Henry Litam, Hannah Leah Pasudag, Apple Mendoza, Jane Malilin, Hannah Cimafranca, Vanessa Lozano, Jane Dadis, Michelle Dantis, Alvin Trono, Harvey Quiwa, Donabel Deinla, Ramlo John Torres, Nicolo Caronan, Phennie Poliquit, Alvin Fortunato

Nico Borromeo, a professor of architecture, is congratulated by his mentor for being a frontrunner for vice dean. His mother, a retired academic, hasn’t recovered from the memory of her husband dying sad and angered because of Nico’s refusal to pursue a professional career in his younger years. When Nico attends a well-off friend’s bachelor’s party, he makes the acquaintance of one of the promo girls, Sasa Sanchez, who charms him with her humor and unaffected manner. When she attempts to sell him a special offer, he snubs her and walks out. As he hails a cab, some thugs attempt to hold him up just as Sasha’s driving by on the way home with her friends. They tell her to intervene and she crashes her vehicle in the process but she’s able to save Nico. When she asks him to cover the cost of her smashed fender, he tells her to visit him at university, where their process of mutual understanding develops. Nico’s mother objects to Sasha’s uncultured ways but Nico’s determined to prove his stubbornness won’t have destructive consequences this time around.

Don’t be put off by the Air Supply power ballad, which has endured in Pinas middlebrow pop culture and whose use was apparently secured for the project. Babe, I Love You has the first of Anne Curtis’s offbeat performances and will go a long way in explaining why her concerts have become fan favorites despite her singing skills being closer to Yoko Ono’s than to any aspiring talent contestant’s. Curtis’s game self-awareness is infectious and always conveys a lingering impression that her gifts might lie elsewhere if they could only be discovered; but with all the fun that could be had even at her own expense, why worry about such ornery concerns? BILY’s one of the few romcoms that signaled a restlessness among Noypi practitioners and audiences, necessitating a fallback on one of the genre’s genealogical properties during its emergence in Classical Hollywood: the class-crossed romance. Some finagling might be at work here, since Curtis belongs to that rare class of actors whose features may be pliable enough to be transformed in a wide variety of ways but who’ll always retain an arresting appeal no matter what her character is made to do. BILY compensates by devoting its central focus to the lead male’s psychosocial predicaments in order to justify the reduction of Curtis’s screen time. But her reappearances have the effect of sweeping away any preceding development and restoring the concerns of the Othered character, which is after all a vital part of the genre’s subversive potential.

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Bride for Rent

Additional Language: Cebuano
Year of Release: 2014
Director: Mae Cruz-Alviar [as Mae Czarina Cruz]
Screenwriters: Charlene Grace Bernardo & Carmi Raymundo
Producers: ABS-CBN Film Productions & Star Cinema

Cast: Kim Chiu, Xian Lim, Empoy Marquez, Martin del Rosario, Pilita Corrales, Tirso Cruz III, Dennis Padilla, Matt Evans, Lloyd Zaragoza, Zeppi Borromeo, Eda Nolan, Gerald Pesigan, Santino Espinoza, Leo Rialp, Marlann Flores, Anita Linda, Tony Mabesa, RJ Ledesma, Jackie Aquino, Roden Araneta, Alex Castro, Artemio Abad, Bodie Cruz, Ivan Asuncion, Arlene Muhlach, Helga Krapf, Loven Canon, Patricia Prieto, Regine “Apan” T. Agra, Mark McMahon, Amelia Villaruel, Olive Isidro, Hersey Gonzales Gregorio, Edgar Allan Yu

High-living scion Roderico “Rocco” Espiritu Jr. is anticipating prosperity when he turns 25, since he’ll be able to collect from his trust fund, so he drunkenly gambles away the money allotted for a major company project. Since he’s estranged from his father Roderico Sr., his grandma Lala oversees his affairs, but then she’s abroad for a health procedure. On the day he expects his long-awaited windfall, his lawyer says that Lala appended a condition for the release of money: he should first prove that he’s married. Since he already dismissed his long-term girlfriend and his work partners are asking him for results, he concocts a fake audition to pick a woman to pose as his wife. The aspirant who wins the role is Racquelita “Rocky” dela Cruz, breadwinner for a large family on the verge of losing the small space whose rent they’ve been unable to cover for half a year already. Rocky soon discovers that she can’t stand Rocco’s heartless and cynical treatment and confesses the deception to the recently returned Lala, whose worrying over Rocco’s immaturity overrides her annoyance over the little trick that she already expected him to pull. She conscripts Rocky to participate in her own scheme to help him realize the error of his ways.

Possibly the closest to a conventional entry in this entire canon list, Bride for Rent nevertheless manages to execute the ordinarily objectionable class-conciliatory trick via a combination of plot reversals and clever casting choices. Allotting the narrative’s decision-making processes to strong-women protagonists has been an enduring strength of Philippine cinema, ever since local history affirmed its feasibility in countering the excesses of military dictatorship nearly half a century ago. The aspect that required careful treading was in setting up the collusion between a grande dame and a hard-working slum dweller, who first meet as allies-to-be when the latter is evicted by her landlady in the pouring rain. The project certainly benefited from casting Xian Lim and Kim Chiu, love-team actors who then had minimal social baggage of their own and could commit to tragicomic role-playing without much difficulty. But the unexpected coup was in the selection of a performer whose classy-mestiza projection was always complemented with camp, of a sort that cut across classes, genders, and nationalities. A long list of contemporaries could certainly outperform her without much effort, but Pilita Corrales’s benign and self-amused presence, anchored on several marks of Otherness starting with her halting delivery of Tagalog lines, arrives at just the point when the story required the intervention of the equivalent of a fairy godmother. All that BfR had to do after Corrales shows up is ensure that Chiu’s working-class character never loses her moral ascendancy and avoids the usual pitfall of turning a slum resident into a princess-in-waiting. BfR facilitates this by configuring its male object’s status as a popular media figure and endowing the woman with the immediately recognizable dignity derived from a life of hardship. Proof that genre elements can still be faithfully observed yet yield rewards that art cinema could only aspire toward at the risk of losing its own dignity.

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Nuuk

Additional Language: Greenlandic
Year of Release: 2019
Director: Veronica Velasco [as Veronica B. Velasco]
Screenwriters: Aileen Alcampado, Veronica Velasco, Jinky Laurel
(From a story by Erwin Blanco & Aileen Alcampado)
Producers: Viva Films, OctoArts Films, Mavx Productions

Cast: Aga Muhlach, Alice Dixson, Ujarneq Fleischer, Elaine Yu, Amisuna Berthelsen, Ane Marie Ottosen, Cherisa Chy Dupitas, Maja Thomsen, Giard Paul Dupitas, Kim Kimsen, Jennifer Baquit, Ann Cortez, Stephen Bonotan, Jemina Sørensen, Mikkel R. Sørensen, Geraldine Lontac Lastein, Kevin Dalugdug, Tom Lynge, Ike Giroy, Bertha Lynge, Tuperna Kristiansen, Silvia Olsen, Angel Calmiag Teran, Junie Ducay, Jovanie Ducay, Harold Ducay, Marlouis Ducay, Hugh Ducay, Henrik de Leon, Jason Jensen, Mario Castillo, Irwin Lee Dupitas, Jesper Øraker, Nukakkuluk Kreutzmann

Elaisa Svendsen, a recently widowed overseas Filipina, needs Prozac for her insomnia, but the pharmacist refuses her request unless she can get a renewed prescription from her still-vacationing doctor. Mark Alvarez, a fellow Filipino whom she doesn’t know, overhears her predicament and offers her some of the tablets he just purchased. He asks for her number in case he might get into trouble for violating the law. When she gets home, she takes too many pills and dials her phone for help. She wakes up next morning to find Mark attending to her, saying she dialed his number and he had to break her window to be able to get to her. She tells him about her situation, including her problem with her rebellious son Karl: she identified his girlfriend using a rival girl’s name and the depressive woman, consumed with jealousy, wrangled with Karl and killed herself. Karl arrives during Mark’s later visit but runs away that night after quarreling with Elaisa, just as Mark’s driving away and almost hits him. The two of them have a conversation about their difficulty coping with Greenland culture and Karl admits that he prefers to stay in the Philippines, which he’d visited once with his parents. Mark tells him and, later, Elaisa that he thinks it’s a great idea, since she plans to set up a business in the home country. Right before boarding the plane for their trip, Karl discovers that he forgot his passport and has to retrieve it at home. Elaisa tells him to take a later flight but he tells her a blizzard began and flights have been canceled. Elaisa though encounters a few more surprises when she arrives in Pinas.

Greenland has assumed increasing significance since the relase of Nuuk, titled after the country’s capital city. Under the second presidency of Donald Trump, it has become an object of colonial contention between the continentally co-located US and European leaders responding in support of Denmark, its postcolonial administrator in a still-evolving conflicted relationship. More relevant to the Philippine condition are two matters: first, overseas Filipino workers constitute the biggest number of foreign residents in Greenland, poetically apposite for a population with a history of both European and American occupations; and second, another local film, also woman-directed and set in the margins of Western Europe, came out the same year by the same producer. Sigrid Andrea Bernardo’s UnTrue, set in the Republic of Georgia, would stand tall on its own terms and would therefore be an unfair basis for comparison. Nevertheless, certain similarities between it and Nuuk, as well as with other celebrated works from 2022 where the OFW presence looms later in the narratives—Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness and Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo—raise cautionary issues recognizable to any outsider who ventures to reside in cold countries: any excitement or romanticism will eventually be subsumed under issues of sustenance, if not survival. As in UnTrue, these get formulated in terms of heterosexual gender conflicts, linked to incidents in the home country. Nuuk distinguishes itself by turning on the tragedy of a pursuit of retribution that overrides any possibility of remorse on the part of the wrongdoer, although the more unexplored aspect of the narrative lies in the cause of conflict between the protagonists: their offsprings’ thorough immersion in a culture (signified by their fluency in the local language) that their parents are too alienated from handling, and therefore understandably helpless in intermediating. Nuuk justifies the treatment it presents in order to provide a handle for the audience in figuring out, along with the parents, what their children are undergoing. A forthcoming wave in the OFW saga would be works where second-generation Filipinos in foreign places narrate their own stories, on their own terms, already evident in a limited number of hyphenated works (mostly Fil-Am) but insufficiently global enough to acknowledge the presence of fellow nationals in every part of the world.

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1—Bayaw

English Title: Brothers in Law
Year of Release: 2009
Director & Screenwriter: Monti Parungao [as Monti Puno Parungao]
(From a story by Danio Caw)
Producer: Climax Films

Cast: Danilo Vergara, Janvier Daily, Andrew Miguel, Kaye Alipio, Tina Agregado, Daniel Magbanua Jr., Noel Cabuhat, Cleo Muparanum, Jun Austria, Danilo Arayde Jr., Benedict Flores, Manny Pahaub, Rizaldi “Saysay” Rodriguez, Rolly Fundales, Hazel, Dhang Macapagal, Monti Parungao, Don Marion Mariring, Sany Chua, Onin Lara, Johnrex Espinosa, Alvin Agoncillo, Jeff Almazan

Danilo Vergara is taken out of his jail cell to be interviewed by a police investigator. He narrated how he had difficulty making ends meet as an entry-level police officer, forced to engage in petty corruption but finally targeted in a buy-bust operation. His brother-in-law Rhenan Jacinto is a neighborhood layabout, betting on spider combats and earning playing money by selling himself to queer onlookers. Danilo’s wife gets increasingly antagonistic with her hubby and brother, since she has to act as sole earner from nightclub work. When Danilo gets fed up with her insults, the couple quarrel over his gun—which accidentally discharges and kills her. He and Rhenan flee to a distant town where they use up the money they brought to stay in a motel and snatch valuables from unsuspecting pedestrians. Eric, another sidewalk denizen, makes their acquaintance and offers the use of a small room where he squats. Whenever Danilo feels stressed and needs to find relief, he makes use of Rhenan, with Eric becoming an additional option. Eric though seeks to split the alliance between the fugitives, which Rhenan is too naïve to notice but which Danilo readily realizes.

2—The Escort

Year of Release: 2011
Director: Monti Parungao [as Monti Puno Parungao]
Screenwriter: Lex Bonife
(From a story by Lance D. Collins)
Producers: Lexuality Entertainment & Treemount Pictures

Cast: Miko Pasamonte, Danniel Derramyo, Jommel Idulan, Bryal Legaspi, Katleen Borbon, Franklin Jundak, Dennis Diwa, Lance D. Collins, Bien Rivera, Edward Sanggalang, Hart Thiel Pascual, Joseph Daoang, Alan Dimaano, Clifford Coloma, R.J. Naguit

Karlo barely earns enough to cover his rent and has to contend with prospective clients who renege on their appointments. At the bar where he makes himself available to johns on the prowl, Yuri introduces himself and confesses an attraction to him. Karlo takes him home for a night together, where Yuri also narrates how he has to live with a congenital ailment. Karlo agrees to a second meetup, a rarity for him, and has to blow off a lucrative date with an eager client. He discovers that his other sources have avoided him, pressured by the client angered by his turnaround. When Yuri also seems to have canceled him, he tries to determine his new pal’s whereabouts and encounters unwelcome news.

During the decidedly transitional period, roughly the first decade of the current millennium, when video production was low-end enough to enable mall screenings without threatening celluloid releases, the resulting niche was immediately occupied by soft-core gay-male material, inasmuch as it attracted the kind of audience who could use darkened spaces as an opportunity to cruise for prospective partners. Monti Parungao was one of the names associated with the trend, although his output was less prolific than most. Typical of the spell in Pinas “queer” cinema, the releases were short and traded on romantic tales intended for distracted consumption. Bayaw and The Escort complement each other for being two-hander quest narratives premised on the aspirations of underprivileged individuals. The fugitives in Bayaw define their interactions as situational occurrences—i.e., they make use of available warm bodies to satisfy their carnal needs, and only arrive at a realization of an emotional attachment ironically when imprisonment stops them from fleeing further. In TE, an older hustler is surprised to realize how the love he dispenses is precisely what he had been depriving himself of, awakened to this reality by a younger practitioner who happens to admire him. The epiphany occurs early enough, so the story should conclude when it happens, were it not for the intrusion of complications induced by the characters’ destitution. Film critic Jojo Devera points out in his review how hope and despair collide in the characters’ crossroads, where they “coexist in a contemporary world of excess and absurdity normalized amidst the chaos of it all, while dismantling social boundaries” (“Everybody Hustles,” Sari-Saring Sineng Pinoy, November 2024, posted online). Parungao’s presentations deliver on the promise of significance and poignancy in a much-abused and unfairly derided subgenre.

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Greatest Performance [unfinished]

Year of Intended Release: 1989
Director & Screenwriter: Nora Aunor [as Guy]
Producer: NCV Films

Cast: Nora Aunor, Tirso Cruz III; Julio Diaz; Kristoffer Ian de Leon; Fe de los Reyes; Rez Cortez; Lara Melissa de Leon, Jet Montelibano, Butch Elizalde, German Moreno, Michael de Mesa, Tony Carreon, Miguel Tanciangco, Bella Flores, Nonoy Zuñiga, Bobby Taylo

Laura’s body is carried out of an auditorium where a young unnamed fan wanders backstage to dwell on his memory of her. Laura’s life unfolds as her success as a singer enables a lifestyle of debauchery, which people in her social orbit exploit. She lives with Cholo, a violence-prone musician who turns to drugs out of frustration from his lack of success in managing her career. Her propensity to get stoned by herself results in a traumatic incident where a gang of men invite her to their table and drug her in order to gang-rape her; she attempts to gun them down afterward but gives up and intensifies her addictive behavior. After her attempt to stage a concert at a small-time fashion venue results in her band members brawling with unruly audience members, she pleads with an amorous producer. But when the latter attempts to sexually assault her, Cholo shows up and shoots him dead. After Cholo lands in jail and a sheriff confiscates her band’s musical instruments because of their inability to cover their bank loan, she binges out on liquor and drugs, with Briccio picking her up and taking her to a rehab clinic. Briccio convinces her to stage an anniversary concert as her way of announcing her intention to turn over a new leaf, but Cholo escapes from jail and hooks up with her, inciting Briccio’s psychotic condition.

Possibly the most irregular entry in this entire canon listing, Greatest Performance underwent the exceptional journey of embodying Nora Aunor’s ultimate auteurist aspiration: she was producer, director, writer, lead actor, and singer. Exasperated by the creative pressures weighing on the project, she encountered rejection from the Metro Manila Film Festival, which had always been receptive to her proposals in the past and even after this case. Having already spent around ₱3 million (over ₱21 million in current value), she decided to scrap the entire undertaking—easier to accomplish then because of the celluloid nature of the footage. Film critic-archivist Jojo Devera, one of her confidants, managed to secure a low-end video transfer, which she also wished to destroy when she learned of its existence. With her demise in March 2025, the film may now be counted as public-domain material, with the implicit acknowledgment that Aunor did not wish for its persistence.[1] As it is, the transferred copy still requires sound effects, some dubbing and trimming, editorial transitions, and closing credits (a clear signal not just of its provisional nature but also of Aunor’s well-known timidity is her director-writer credit, which uses her nickname “Guy,” as well as her producer’s credit designated with only her initials). Nevertheless it tracks a Todesroman (a coming-of-death story, as opposed to the coming-of-age Bildungsroman) in a performing artist’s life, using a fictionalization of experiences that she acknowledged as part of her personal history in a series of interviews that she granted upon her return in 2011 from her extended US sabbatical. In fact her store of first-person narratives was capable of yielding even more controversial material, but the undeniable intertext for which GP could serve as corrective was an earlier MMFF project that purported to depict the life of a successful singer, but which proceeded from the preposterously hoary, not to mention sexist, perspective that a female pop-culture figure’s success is less worthy than the life of a male doctoral candidate. GP does not reject the moralistic premise, a decision that potentially weakens its ideological position, but it does show an insider’s intimate familiarity with the extremes and dangers that a dissipated star’s life could sink to, and configures the men in the central character’s life as destructive forces. Moreover, it furnishes the singular element that Aunor insisted on acknowledging, all the way to the end of her existence: the support of her fans. In GP only one admirer (played by her biological child) interacts with the singer’s life, but the fan’s loyalty, helplessness, and insistence on being present during her career peaks speaks volumes about the high regard Aunor placed on her followers. GP might yet reemerge as a closer-to-finalized sample, especially with forthcoming developments in artifical-intelligence solutions, but even in its present damaged condition, its embodiment of the Noranian predicament will prove rewarding to any appreciator of Philippine film stardom. Almost needless to add, astute directorial judgments are literally evident in her setups and cutting points, with even the most minor performers carefully coached for the roles they assume. The dialogues are borderline-démodé, but then nearly her entire performance is either reactive or silent—an acknowledgment of the strength that her directors admired: hard to believe, considering Aunor’s formidable track record, but the film’s “greatest performance” title is fully earned, even in terms of the final number she sings. If the MMFF authorities had any inkling of the historical document that they so casually dismissed, they would have realized that all the later accolades they granted Aunor could never compensate for the near-loss suffered by GP.

Note

[1] For a special issue of Kritika Kultura devoted to Philippine film stardom, for which I was preparing an article on Nora Aunor, I learned about the existence of Jojo Devera’s video copy of Greatest Performance and asked permission from Aunor, via Ricky Lee, so I could conduct a close reading of the material, with the assurance that the resultant study would be strictly academic—a request that was granted; the KK article is titled “Firmament Occupation: The Philippine Star System” and appeared in the volume 25 (August 2015) issue, pages 248–284, doi:10.13185/1656-152×1653. A few years later, Devera organized an informal group comprising critics and tech experts to request, via video conferencing, that she allow the completion of the film, even without her participation. Here she drew the line and made it clear that as far as she was concerned, she was over the project and that she did not wish any further work to be done on it. With Aunor’s death in March 2025, Devera has been overseeing possibilities for readying GP for public consumption.

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Baboy Halas: Wailings in the Forest

English Translation of Primary Title: Wild Boar
Language: Matigsalug
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Bagane Fiola
Screenwriters: Bagane Fiola, Bem Di Lera, Janna Moya
(From a story by Bagane Fiola)
Producers: QCinema International Film Festival, Origane Films, CoolLab Studios

Cast: Omeles Laglagan, Ailyn Laglagan, Vangelyn Panihao, Jhea Mae Laglagan, Danilo Casig, Sadam Dagsil, Rolly Panihao, Henyo Panihao, Ernesto Capal, Daniel Adang, Daniel Naran, Elvie Magwana, Imelda Lascuña, Jasmen Flores, Jessa Jaime, Lita Lantong, Merlie Lantong, Sheryl Arendain, Daniel Dagsil, Araiz Panihao, April Laglagan, Beah Maguana, Emily Dagsil, Felepe Lantong, Felix Laglagan, Janeth Lantong, John Philip Laglagan, Julius Laglagan, Lita Casig, Lolita Lantong, Mad Laglagan, Marcelino Singkianon, Mercy Laglagan, Nena Singkianon, Nenita Gordo, Nueme Panihao, Pepe Laglagan, Renato Lumin, Ruben Lantong, Taisan Panihao

[Note: spoilers provided] Despite the supplication of his datu (tribal chieftain) to their god Manama, Mampog has difficulty catching a wild boar, which his family relies on for their supply of meat. Du, another tribe member, convinces a woman from another tribe to live with him, in defiance of her commitment to another man. Her angered husband attacks Du and succeeds in killing him, resulting in a pangayaw or tribal war. In order to wage for peace, the man who killed Du agrees to provide Du’s tribespeople with five horses, although he pleads that two pieces of metal treasures be substituted for the fifth. The aggrieved tribe’s datu accepts the offer and the tribe members celebrate their husay or restoration of order. Meanwhile, Mampog takes leave of his two wives in order to hunt but, after performing a ritual in a cave, finds instead a fantastically white-colored wild sow. He brings it home but refuses to slaughter it. At night, he sees the sow in the form of a white diwata or nymph and follows it through the forest, then loses track of it. He kills a group of young drinkers and leaps into the river by a waterfall; when he surfaces, he finds several wailing nymphs surrounding him. Next day, one of his wives searches for him, bringing her hunting weapon. She asks the drinkers where he went and they answer. When she nears the falls, she finds a black boar and aims her arrow at it.

In ethnographic cinema, feature films on indigenous societies made by well-intentioned practitioners are always in danger of succumbing to the artist’s bias, with the subjects subjugated to the filmmaker’s vision. One such approach intended to minimize this problem, Jean Rouch’s cinéma vérité, proved useful enough to be appropriated as one of the new devices in the toolbox of the French New Wave. An even more subject-responsive method, described as the “filmmaker-initiated mode of intercultural filmmaking” by Katrina Ross A. Tan in her article titled “Lumad Image-Making in Baboy Halas (2016) through Intercultural Filmmaking” (published 2022 in Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 1–14, doi:10.59588/2782-8875.1036), suffuses the entrancing execution of Baboy Halas. As such, the film also requires more advanced prep than usual—one reason why its synopsis here is extensive, to the point of including plot twists, though any possible matriarchal influence is no longer apparent. Bagane Fiola’s purpose is entirely laudable: to create a work whose primary audience would be the Matigsalug audience, witnessing themselves and hearing their language in film for the first time. As such, the film-viewing experience would place the rest of the global audience in a quandary, since the film eschews the use of a narrator and, admittedly admirably, deploys sophisticated storytelling devices. The film’s several incidents, premised on the parallel narratives of two tribesmen, are filled with nuances, implications, and interrelations, drawn from Fiola’s constant consultation with the datu and other members of the tribe, and explicated satisfactorily in Tan’s article. The rewards of responsible readiness provide extra benefits for the outside appreciator, as befits the best samples of ethnofiction: Who hasn’t wondered, for example, whether overfamiliar scenes of seduction, elopement, and bloody revenge in Westernized movies can incite the same level of suspense alongside amusement when played out by indigenous actors (who’ll incidentally always stand out by their physical beauty and graceful movements in lush forests, where the sounds of nature provide a unique kind of accompaniment)? Will the enchantment of forces that refuse to conform to our rational understanding prove as terrifying to these people as they undoubtedly would to us? The answers lie in securing a copy of BH and stepping into a world that even an ordinary Philippine audience would find enthralling.

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Ang Huling Cha-Cha ni Anita (Anita’s Last Cha-Cha)

Alternate Title: Ang Huling Cha-Cha ni Anita
Year of Release: 2013
Director & Screenwriter: Sigrid Andrea Bernardo [as Sigrid Andrea P. Bernardo]
Producers: Ekweytormc, Pixeleyes Multimedia, Quiapost Productions

Cast: Angel Aquino, Therese Malvar, Jay Bordon, Lenlen Frial, Solomon Mark de Guzman, Marcus Madrigal, Lui Manansala, Gigi Columna, Star Orjaliza, Sarah Pagcaliwagan, Rhea Medina, Leo Salazar, Jim Bergado, Sang Pascual, Fudge de Leon, Marjorie Lorico, Joel Ian Pagcaliwagan, Yano Escueta

As a military officer, Anita makes sure her cadets observe strict discipline, but when one of them admits that she’s distracted because she fell for an enlisted man, Anita smiles inwardly and recalls the time when she was still a child hanging out with her chums Carmen and Goying. The two playact the rituals of courtship and flirtation expected of normal children, but Anita’s attention is focused on a new arrival, the grownup Pilar. All the townspeople ostracize Pilar and she accepts their judgment, but Anita eventually realizes that this stemmed from an earlier time when Pilar was not just an abortionist but also a homewrecker. Anita realizes that her early stirrings of desire are for Pilar, and the latter similarly welcomes her as another outcast because of her masculine comportment and choice of clothes. When the past that Pilar left behind catches up with her, Anita realizes that Pilar will have no one else to look after her, just as Pilar also finds ways to nurture Anita in her own way. The looming feast-day celebration of Santa Clara imposes religion-induced conservative values on the townsfolk but also, inasmuch as their icon is famed for fertility, an awareness of the necessity for sexual fulfillment.

Same-sex desire had been around in Philippine cinema since the sexual-libertarian period of the early 1970s (actually 1969, with the first male kiss in Armando Garces’s Eric). It took lesbianism, however, over a decade, in the 1990s, before non-negative imaging could begin. The emergence of low-budget digital production in the present millennium also once more neglected the women’s option, since queer male audiences could use soft-core film presentations as an opportunity for cruising in film theaters, a too-risky activity for women. Hence the serendipitous emergence of Ang Huling Cha-Cha ni Anita was more than just an instance of “better late than never”—which, in the wiser formulation of Geoffrey Chaucer, was originally expressed as “better than never is late”: local so-called queer films, replicating premillennial US practice, were essentially gay-male romcom stories with lots of skin, with departures from middle-class romances comprising the exceptions that proved the rule. AHCCA triumphed partly by proffering some of the charms that inhered in Aureus Solito’s Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005), with its cross-gender-identified innocent awakening to the insurmountable summons of same-sex attraction. True to her 21st-century habitation, Anita, like Maxie before her, finds nothing anomalous about her baby-butch crush on a near-perfect specimen who just arrived in her community, although their immediate family members, for different reasons, find cause for worry in their respective objects of desire. AHCCA proceeds from a more conservative context because of its religiously inflected rural setting, but then Anita and her beau ideal manage to spend intimate though chaste moments together, a near-impossible situation in Maxie’s slum residence. The framing device, where Anita’s childhood is recollected by her older self, is dispensable for the most part, and fortunately the storytelling aptly makes light use of it, to set the mood of humor in the beginning and nostalgia in the end.

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Lorna

Additional Language: Hiligaynon
Year of Release: 2014
Director & Screenwriter: Sigrid Andrea Bernardo [as Sigrid Andrea P. Bernardo]
Producer: Creative Programs

Cast: Shamaine Buencamino, Maria Isabel Lopez, Raquel Villavicencio, Lav Diaz, Felix Roco, Jim Paredes, Juan Rodrigo, Angel Aquino, Miguel Faustmann, Karl Medina, Alex Medina, Lui Manansala, Mackie Galvez, Lem Lorca, Lilit Reyes, Mao Mao, Nesta, Chinky V. Tan, Jona Ballaran, Sarah Pagcaliwagan, Ethel Fernandez, Lexter Capilia, Nicole Benzon, Moisel Apon, Rinald Derosario, Ronald Oliveros, Mayumi Gonzales

Single mother Lorna hangs out and contrasts with her high-school batchmates Miriam and Elvie. While all three were badly treated by their spouses, Miriam uses her hubby’s money to splurge on herself and treat her friends, while Elvie devotes her time and resources to the welfare of her descendants. Lorna admits that her ex-partner never reciprocated the love she had for him, and when she meets the younger woman he decided to marry, she treats her with civility. Their son Ardie, a band player, also deals with a turbulent love life; but while preparing for a reunion on the occasion of Miriam’s birthday, the friends discover that their campus heartthrob, a musician now named Rocky, is Ardie’s social-network acquaintance. Lorna and Rocky almost became a number way back when. Since she was really ghosted by a long-distance prospect, Lorna finds herself vulnerable to Rocky’s courtship. The two of them talk about their past apart from each other and discover that they have more in common now than they used to as HS classmates.

Sigrid Andrea Bernardo announced that her next major film, after Ang Huling Cha-Cha ni Anita (2013), was going to be a tribute to her mother, although her first choice for the title role, Nora Aunor, was unavailable when production began. One can see how Aunor could have introduced elements that would have elevated Lorna beyond the romantic comedies that she had mastered for most of her film career, but Bernardo had enough perspicacity to recognize where theater veteran Shamaine Buencamino could upgrade the viewing experience in her own way. She situates a teen-movie staple, a scene where female friends turn giggly over the presence of an ideal male catch, after the narrative midpoint, and makes us instantly realize how the accumulation of years makes the experience far more rewarding because of how the participants earned the right to indulge in silly pleasures. In line with her lead actor’s career specialization, she devices theatrical situations to highlight the turning points at this period in Lorna’s story, and not surprisingly Buencamino holds court in these scenes without any perceptive exertion. Bernardo by this point was already staking her claim as chronicler of the overlooked and/or downgraded members in contemporary Philippine womanhood, but part of the challenge in evaluating her auteuristic output is in recognizing how she appropriates stylistic approaches that serve the purpose of making her material palatable to mass viewers.

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UnTrue

Year of Release: 2019
Director & Screenwriter: Sigrid Andrea Bernardo [as Sigrid Andrea P. Bernardo]
Producers: Viva Films & The IdeaFirst Co.

Cast: Cristine Reyes, Xian Lim, Rhen Escaño, Peewee O’Hara, George Lasha, Tengiz Javakhidze, Lera Chikvaidze, Giorgi Makharadze, Luminita Gamboa, Anita Haines, Pouna Khalili, Par Maghzi, Andy Knots, Magkee Khiabani, Edison Maghzi, Sophiko Khachidze, Misho Maisuradze, Ramin Ghonghadze, Shota Ghonghadze, Beso Kirikashvili, Irakli Uchaneish, Giorgi Khelashvili, Givi Poti Abesadze, Givi Bauradze, Nodar Kartsivadze, Giorgi Kartsivadze, Karlo Alavidze

A badly battered Mara tells a Georgian police officer that her husband is missing. Asked to tell her story, she narrates how, on his way to meet his Georgian vineyard business partner at the latter’s restaurant, Joachim bumped into her and one of his bottles fell and broke. As it turns out, Mara was the new waitress and Joachim befriended her as a fellow compatriot. Their relationship moved quickly, seemingly borne along by Joachim’s impulsive decisions—to move to an isolated residence, for example, and get married. He also had outbursts of rage over minor matters, and swerved while driving because he thought he’d run over a girl. After several attempts by Mara to get him to see a psychiatrist, Joachim presents his version of events to the specialist, going over the same incidents that Mara narrated but this time on the premise that Mara dominated their relationship. The couple’s conflicted relationship is rooted in incidents in their home country, when Joachim was a schoolteacher who conducted an ill-advised affair with one of his students, which resulted in a social-media sex scandal.

Sigrid Andrea Bernardo’s development as filmmaker is apparently premised on a nonnegotiable premise shared by a few though fortunately increasing number of millennium-era directors: that only those regarded as society’s Others deserve to be positioned front and center in her stories. From that point onward, she set for herself challenges that departed further from personal (and even geographic) experience, although it would be safer for us to take the admonition of the Greek playwright’s character, that nothing human is alien to any other human. UnTrue stands out not just in her body of work or even among Philippine women filmmakers, but as a global text that closely inspects the dynamics of trauma, pain, and the pleasure that has the potential to accompany exceptional cases of our experience of these sensations. Bernardo draws from the privilege exercised by Pinay filmmakers, where women’s suffering can be depicted with the certainty that they would be aware of its origins and dimensions, and that the director would never let go of her empathy for the sufferer. Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Milagros (1997) would be the ne plus ultra in this realm of discourse, but Bernardo’s achievement lies in her stepping away from these concerns and revealing, in progressively startling ways, the sadistic pleasure that men might be able to derive and, as payback, the cruelty that women are capable of inflicting. The revelation is subtle and ironic, since in any realistic instance of mutual combat, human females would inevitably physically lose to males. Yet UT requires an impartial foreign system to rescue (as it were) the defeated male; the selection of the Republic of Georgia as figurative battleground resonates with the Philippines’s labor-export strategies and blends near-perfectly with the detrital beauty that typifies Eastern European film aesthetics, but it also raises parallel issues in both countries’ predicaments—i.e., lying adjacent to hostile neighbors, approaching developed status with difficulty, and observing Christian practice (with Georgia fortunately aligned with its own Orthodox church rather than the Vatican State). In its refusal to declare any definitive winner between its flawed though well-matched protagonists, UT looks forward to more ambitious material from a still-young but already unstoppable talent.

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