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Amigo

English Translation: Friend
Additional Languages: Cantonese, Spanish
Year of Release: 2010
Director & Screenwriter: John Sayles
(Based on research used in John Sayles’s 2011 novel A Moment in the Sun; Tagalog translations by Jose F. Lacaba)
Producers: Anarchist’s Convention Films & Pinoy Pictures

Cast: Arthur Acuña, Irma Adlawan, John Arcilla, Merlin Bonning, Hoffman Cheng, Reymart Colestines, Ermie Concepcion, Chris Cooper, Dane DeHaan, Garret Dillahunt, Miguel Faustmann, Brian Lee Franklin, Joe Gruta, J.P. Jagunos, Ronnie Lazaro, Rio Locsin, Diana Malahay, Raul Manikan, Spanky Manikan, Pen Medina, Raul Morit, Lucas Neff, James Obenza, Jemi Paretas, James Parks, Bodjie Pascua, DJ Qualls, Lady Jane Rellita, Bembol Roco, Bill Tangradi, Stephen Monroe Taylor, Joel Torre, Ka Chun Tsoi, Yul Vazquez

Rafael is the cabeza or head of the small rural town of San Isidro, while his brother joined the anticolonial revolution against Spain, which has transmuted into the Filipino–American War. American troops arrive and take over the town and instruct Rafael to continue his function while freeing the incarcerated Spanish priest, even as Rafael’s adolescent son flees to join his uncle’s resistance army. Rafael finds himself caught between the revolutionary leadership’s instructions and the commands of the new occupation forces, who provide a carrot-and-stick strategy to win the cooperation of the townfolk. They set up telegraph wires to communicate directly with the US administration in Manila but the rebels massacre the Chinese coolies that the Americans brought over. Lt. Compton, with the priest as go-between, organizes an election to select a new leader, but the qualified voters (males at least 21 years old) write in Rafael’s name; true to his promise, Compton honors their choice and even accedes to their plans for their annual town fiesta. The arrival of Col. Hardacre, who’d earlier instructed his troops to fence off the town to prevent San Isidro from providing insurrectionists with support, restores the tense relations between the natives and the US Army, as Rafael is waterboarded and forced to lead the US soldiers to the place where his brother and son might be hiding.

The resonance of the brother-vs.-brother conflict in Amigo is so schematic, biblical even, that it proves a relief when John Sayles opts to focus instead on the regular interactions between Rafael and the people in his community, even including the foreign invaders. Amigo demonstrates that authors of Western film and literature can only begin to understand their own societies’ prosperity-driven triumphs by confronting their colonial records. John Sayles’s political honesty and moral clarity enabled him to come up with the first US-made critical text on his country’s occupation of the Philippines, and one can see the approach’s usefulness in how Western film critics eagerly read contemporary American political concerns in their appreciation of the release, including a covert attempt by the official whom Rafael had won over, to subvert his own superior. There were also a lot of reservations expressed about the work compared to Sayles’s earlier output, although we might be able to take the cue from the quandary that Rafael finds himself trapped in: try as he might to reconcile the demands of either side, their inherent antagonisms will result (as they did in the plot) in either division deciding that their best interest will be best realized if they get rid of him. In this respect, it would also prove productive to see how Sayles, inadvertently or otherwise, anticipated several then-forthcoming developments in Philippine politics: the population’s frustration with democratic processes, the acceptance of militaristic violence against elements configured as outlaws, the vulnerability to influence-peddlers who have their own agenda to advance. The viewing experience has always been difficult for anyone, regardless of nationality, invested in the story’s historical implications—which is tantamount to saying that more ambitious plans announced by other American film artists might encounter greater difficulty in reaching an audience. Amigo might therefore remain for some time the only overt progressive treatment by Americans on their only successful overseas colonial adventure (to our long-term detriment, needless to add), and it serves as a fitting cap to its filmmaker’s exemplary career.

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Mabangis na Lungsod

English Translation: Ferocious City
Alternate Titles: No hoi wai lung; Tough Beauty and the Sloppy Slop
Year of Release: 1995
Directors: Alan Chui Chung-San & Yuen Bun [with action direction by Alan Chui Chung-San & Lee Chi-Kit]
Screenwriter: Fok King-yiu
Producers: Libran Films, Libran Motion Pictures, New Treasurer Films Co.

Cast: Yuen Biao, Cynthia Khan, Monsour del Rosario, Lee Waise, Billy Chow, Yuen Wah, Alan Chui Chung-San, Jerry Bailey, Wai Lam, Peter Chan, Wai Shum, Tam Suk-mui, Wong Ngok-wah, Lam Ngok-wah, Alex Man, Lily Leung

[Note: characters’ names apparently vary depending on language version.] Major Sandos and his partner bust a transaction about to be consummated by some drug dealers in a double-deck bus and later arrest the wife of drug dealer Hwa Quo, who in turn arranges the killing of Sandos’s partner during his mother’s birthday celebration. Meanwhile in Hong Kong, police officer Yiang discovers that Hwa Quo’s operation makes use of counterfeit bills for their overseas drug transactions. She is assigned to befriend Hwa Quo’s wife in jail in Manila, with another operative, Li Chin Tang, masquerading as her husband. The pair succeed in freeing the wife and befriending Hwa Quo, who’s impressed by their fighting skills and assigns increasingly sensitive missions, culminating with the killing of Sandos. Their cover’s almost blown when Li mourns his best friend’s demise, but Hwa Quo’s higher-up wishes to make their acquaintance. Just when Hwa Quo’s suspicions endanger them, Sandos turns up and informs them that he deliberately set up his mock execution in order to end Hwa Quo’s pursuit.

Mabangis na Lungsod may be regarded as one of the realizations of the inter-Asian exchanges that Pinas initiated when it was still a fairly influential American client state. A list of blunders and misjudgments will make itself available for anyone who wishes to insist on perfect representation, but then one should also be obliged to point out any compensatory achievements when these become evident. The ML project was completed during the buildup toward the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, when HK cinema was nearing the end of several decades of productivity; for this reason, the film was considered the equivalent of a B-movie, a ripoff of a franchise sequel, deficient in star power and stunts and explosives. Moreover, the necessarily cartoonish approach to plot and character results in a host of sexist and lesbophobic devices that, coupled with the HK industry’s valorization of police work, create products whose primary value lies almost exclusively in their provision of visual and kinetic pleasure. But the Pinas locale also yields a few critical touches: police and government officials readily collaborate with foreign elements when they’re capable of financial enticement, and the opening hostage situation involving a public bus, where the use of firepower only resulted in multiple tragedies, should have served as a warning to local officials when a similar crisis emerged in real life in 2010. Viewed several decades later, the relatively modest dimensions of ML remain superior to the run of most local action films, where its creatives’ aesthetic discipline furnishes split-second edits that serve as conduits for fluid delineations, tongue always firmly lodged in cheek. One could reasonably speculate how action aficionado Toto Natividad, the country’s last best celluloid-era filmmaker, could have taken notes in order to further upgrade his skills set.

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1—Da Dog Show

English Title: The Dog Show
Year of Release: 2015
Director & Screenwriter: Ralston Jover [as Ralston G. Jover]
(With Sergio Redolosa & Howie Severino as story consultants)
Producers: Queen B Productions & sam cinema

Cast: Lou Veloso, Mercedes Cabral, Almira Alcid, Bernard Carritero, Aljon Ibañez, Simon Ibarra, Micko Laurente, Cherry Malvar, OJ Mariano, Flor Salanga, Menchie Diaz Tabije Villavert, Jhorel Bocade, Bobby Tamayo, Joshua Liechtenberg, Janzhed Negrite, Arrian Labios, Roma Oyson, Sandino Buan, Bernard Carritero, Kathleen Reyna, Rener Concepcion, Anthony Camposano, Jasmine Brazil

Although he should be retired at his age, 73-year-old Sergio has to continue earning a living by staging sidewalk programs where both of his trained dogs perform tricks for an audience of strangers in exchange for money. His intellectually disabled grownup daughter Celia helps him while her younger brother Alvin goes to school. For the past thirty years, they’ve been residing in the mausoleum of Sergio’s late employers—an arrangement that upset his wife so much that she fled to her provincial relatives with their youngest son Eddie Boy. Sergio saves up enough money so he could retrieve the kid. After Celia throws a tantrum, knowing she may never see her mother again, he brings her along as well as one of his dogs. His wife however refuses to see him and her relations don’t want to accede to his request without any legal oversight. Negotiations with district officials work out and he’s allowed to take Eddie Boy back to Manila with him, but their journey home turns out to be far more complicated than their arrival.

2—Hamog

English Title: Haze
Year of Release: 2015
Director & Screenwriter: Ralston Jover [as Ralston G. Jover]
Producers: Cinema One Originals, Keep Me Posted, Black Maria Pictures, CMB Film Services, Wildsound Studios

Cast: Zaijian Jaranilla, Therese Malvar, Samuel Quintana, Bon Andrew Lentejas, Kyline Alcantara, OJ Mariano, Anna Luna, Mike Liwag, Lou Veloso, Ruby Ruiz, Flor Salanga, Junjun Quintana, Vic Romano, Jane Torres, Cataleya Surio, Cyril Dayao, Elyboy Medina, Aljon Ibañez, Meljun Quinto, Vincent Olano, John Lloyd Medina, Bernard Carritero, Vangie Castillo, Kiko de Guzman, Eero Yves Francisco, Victor Taniegra, Charry Castinlag, Jomel Redobante, Jelyn Lavarez, Toby Anthony del Rosario, Luis Ruiz

Four street kids live in open spaces and earn a living by stealing from the drivers of vehicles that slow down at the busy cloverleaf interchange on the Makati City side of Epifanio de los Santos Avenue’s Guadalupe Bridge. Moy, the youngest, escaped from an orphanage, while the rest ran away from abusive parents or guardians: Jinky and Tisoy sleep together as a couple, while Rashid is a Muslim abandoned by his mother to his heavy-handed father. They’re familiar with the rules that police, social-work, and district officials of the area seek to impose on them, which is why they avoid getting caught. Their modus operandi consists of distracting a target driver (usually male, without a companion or passenger) and stealing his goods and valuables when he chases away some of them. In one instance, Jinky is caught by Danny, a cab driver, and brought by him to the police precinct; Tisoy, who’s frustrated in being unable to find her, intensifies his sniffing of rugby (named after the popular brand of addictive contact cement) and hallucinates a vision of Supergirl. In another instance, the loot they stash away is swiped by another gang of street kids. They give chase but Moy is hit by a delivery truck driven by an underage guy who’s also fleeing from an abusive employer. With Tisoy too stoned to help, Rashid finds himself alone in arranging for his friend’s burial.

Having written some well-received films for their respective directors, Ralston Jover arrived with raised expectations for his output as filmmaker. The passage of time functions best for the kind of work he does, with its focus on the intimate lives and irresolvable problems of overlooked citizens. The two films he released in 2015 recall the paired similar-yet-different scripts he wrote for Brillante Mendoza nearly a decade earlier, Foster Child and Tirador (Slingshot), both about grownups who turn out to be innocents when confronted with the harsh realities of urban existence. This time the characters are mature enough in approaching the challenges of uneven neoliberal development, but we’re provided the privilege of watching them cope with curveballs that most of us won’t have to worry about precisely because of privilege: consistent with the treatment he provided in all his previous materials, Jover doesn’t allow any of his characters to plead their cases with us—only with specific people in their universe, who they perceive as instrumental in determining whether they can succeed in their pursuits. Da Dog Show’s Sergio, an elderly father reduced to living in a graveyard but defying the reality of fast-approaching mortality for the sake of his four dependents (two humans and two animals) by staging entertainments for strangers, consistent with the derogatory implication of “dogshow” in Pinas slang. Sergio persists nevertheless in order to recover one more son from his estranged wife. The treatment lends itself to comic or melodramatic handling, but Jover unexpectedly accepts the challenge of utilizing secular humanism, an option that initially softens the rough edges of Sergio’s existence but becomes entirely crucial with the increasing unpredictability of events in what should have been a fairly standard mission narrative: wherever Sergio might find himself by the time his hour upon the stage is up, Jover ensures that his fate, or at least an empathetic understanding of it, remains in our hands. In contrast, Hamog might seem to have an excess of the same sentiment, with its most vulnerable character, a severely abused young woman named Jinky, reciting improbably poetic introductory voiceovers … until the troubles that the characters grapple with bring up the question of our own prejudicial assumptions. For if Jinky manages to transcend this vision of hell she’d been plunged into, who’s to say if eloquence might still lie outside her range of abilities? As if to illustrate that existence is never always a strictly linear experience when trauma induces inner turmoil, Jover halts the plot and revisits an earlier incident, in order to make definitively clear why Jinky had to disappear from the lives of her comrades. Such a storytelling “error” would never be permitted by conventional script evaluators, but the triumph of Hamog lies in how this literal plot twist becomes more a necessity than a correction.

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Rene Villanueva’s Hiblang Abo

Alternate Title: Hiblang Abo
English Title: Strands of Gray
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Ralston Jover [as Ralston G. Jover]
Screenwriters: Naning Estrella & Ralston Jover
(From the full-length 1980 play by Rene Villanueva, with poem “Tapus Na ang Prusisyon [The Procession is Over]” by Rener Concepcion)
Producers: Cinemalaya, Queen B Productions, Keep Me Posted, Heaven’s Best Entertainment, Wildsound, Tabula Rasa

Cast: Lou Veloso, Jun Urbano, Leo Rialp, Nanding Josef, Matt Daclan, Lui Manansala, Flor Salanga, Cherry Malvar, Angela Cortez, Mike Liwag, Rommel Luna, Rener Concepcion, Anna Luna, Bernard Carritero

Four geriatric men, each with his own backstory, share a dormitory room in the Bahay ni Juan (John’s House) hospice. Through their voluntary sharing of their individual stories, they find out the reasons that they wound up rejected and, in one case, homeless. Huse was a playwright who came out as gay to his wife but was unable to maintain a student lover and his family’s upkeep. Blas narrates how he was a fiery union organizer although one of his companions uncovers a more disturbing version about the labor strike he led. Sotero, Teroy for short, was a farmer who had to allow his depraved landlord, Don Sixto, to collect his beloved daughter as payment for loans that his harvests could not cover. Pedro was the vagrant abused and rejected by his family, eventually found literally wallowing in mud. Unable to find a way back to the lives they once knew, the four find themselves haunted by their memories and upset at finding out about their companions’ suffering.

Hiblang Abo is the closest that Ralston Jover has come to melodrama, primarily because the source material by Rene Villanueva was conventionally designed and resolutely stagebound. By deciding to observe the play’s lines and structure, and enhancing the artifice by having the same actor depict each of the major characters in their younger years, Jover enables the successfully distinct feel of a filmed play; more important, he allows Villanueva’s long-standing concerns with native masculinities to be foregrounded, with Hiblang Abo intersecting with his own interest in the plight of people neglected by society. The entire outing might sound like a downbeat presentation, but the major attraction of theatrical events abides herein: each of the four lead performers is associated with different outstanding performing-arts circles in the country, decades of experience providing them with well-honed expertise that each one deploys in recollecting the crucial slice of memory that led to the shame and destitution of their seeking refuge in a hospice home. Although aware that Philippine society regards their status as failures, they admit to themselves that no other option remains for them except to await the arrival of the end in the place they happen to find themselves in at the moment. The fact that other sufferers share the same space ought to be a source of some comfort, but the opposite—that their companions’ respective misfortunes remind each of them of his own—could also take hold and upend whatever camaraderie they managed to work on. The most painful aspect of Villanueva’s bleak, heartbreaking vision is that the one among them capable of cruelty will endure, but our journey toward that realization, with some of the best performers of their generation treating us to the late playwright’s delight in language and drama, documented in full creative flowering by an old-for-his-years filmmaker, ensures that Hiblang Abo will age far better than its warmhearted but tragically damaged elderly folk.

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Bomba

English Title: The Bomb
Year of Release: 2017
Director & Screenwriter: Ralston Jover [as Ralston Gonzales Jover]
(From a story by Ralston Jover & Dennis C. Evangelista)
Producers: ATD Entertainment & Heaven’s Best Entertainment

Cast: Allen Dizon, Angeli Nicole Sanoy, Alan Paule, Sue Prado, Kate Brios, Joel Saracho, Felixia Crysten Dizon, Tabs Sumulong, Romeo Lindain, Lucas Allric Dizon, Apol Salonga, Bon Andrew Lentejas

Deaf-mute Pipo leaves his job as custodial assistant in a funeral parlor. The owner, a police officer, wants him to return, but he expresses an aversion to handling dead bodies, which happen to be in abundance because of the out-of-control drug war of then-President Rodrigo R. Duterte. None of the other jobs he finds, including scavenging at the dumpsite where he lives with his young daughter Cyril, earns enough to tide the two of them over. Fortunately the girl is mature for her age and is able to negotiate with grownups in the community. Finally, neighbors concerned with their condition are able to persuade Pipo to return to funerary work. But when Pipo approaches the site of a terrorist attack and is unable to answer the police’s questions, he is mistaken as a suspect and arrested. Cyril meanwhile hears her neighbor Ina pay attention to a man on the radio announcing that his daughter disappeared when her deaf-mute godfather brought her to Manila; Cyril pleads with Ina to leave her and Pipo in peace.

Protagonists in Ralston Jover’s films were consistently marked as highly susceptible to legal and social reprisals, but also as seriously flawed; to draw a link from one condition to the other would be tantamount to revealing one’s biases, rather than the characters’ blameworthiness. Bomba trains the harshest light in his oeuvre so far in its presentation of Pipo: the individual in question has to endure abuse even from strangers who misrecognize his regular appearance and never bother to figure out why he seems unable to understand and respond the way everybody else does; his devotion to Cyril makes his plight even more poignant and disconsolate. Although the latter possesses enough wisdom and valor to make a perfect match for her guardian, she first needs to conform to the greater expectations brought to bear on underage women. Rover intensifies the challenge of empathizing with this pair by focalizing our realization of the worst-case scenario in the responses of a concerned neighbor, their strongest supporter. Her suspicions reverberate throughout their circles, the scandal strong enough to overpower Cyril’s own warning that her father wishes to treat her as a sexual commodity. The final challenge for us (though not for the community, since drug-war violence already ensures what kind of measures will be taken) is to find a way to accommodate Pipo’s reprisal. The navigation provided by Allen Dizon, in a performance that speaks volumes even as the character struggles to articulate basic words, helps in shaping the scope and depth of a person who started with the intent to love and protect and wound up losing everything he held valuable, through no fault of his own.

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Latay (Battered Husband)

Additional Language: Kapampangan
Year of Release: 2019
Director & Screenwriter: Ralston Jover [as Ralston Gonzales Jover]
Producers: BG Productions International, Center Stage Productions, Sinag Maynila

Cast: Allen Dizon, Lovi Poe, Snooky Serna, Mariel de Leon, Soliman Cruz, Adrian Cabido, Tabs Sumulong, Renerich Ocon, Dianne Alvaro, Rhea Usares, Adda Musni, Lucas Allric Dizon, Ryan David, Hernand Tulud, Romeo Lindain, Baby F. Go, Khey Dalit, Art Bajar, Sean Andrei Maliwat, Rosalyn Veray, John Lloyd Mallari, Julie Ann Taylan, Tristan Mallari, Stephanie Tolentino, John Mark Guintu, John Nikki Sotto, Michael Mirador, Billy Gutierrez, Glen O. Gutierrez, Gobak L. Pangilinan, Roy P. Sotto Jr., Jemma Magtoto, Tricia Ann de Jesus, Anne dela Torre Tongol

In Minalin, a municipality in Pampanga, straight males cross-dress in the New Year celebration called Aguman Sanduk (Ladle Association). Olan participates although people who know him realize that the scratches and bruises on his body were inflicted by his wife Lorie because of his unfaithfulness to her. Olan endures her rage since she’ll be leaving for overseas work in a few days and he wants to reconcile with her. His former mistress Cherry visits him to arrange closure with him but Lorie gets wind of their assignation and creates a public disturbance by violently harassing Cherry; when Olan succeeds in separating them, she turns on her husband. Olan is also jealous of Noy, Lorie’s younger friend, and busts the farewell party that members of Lorie’s circle were holding for her. Lorie gives vent to her anger but their quarrel is disrupted by the arrival of Lorie’s mother, who never approved of her daughter’s choice of husband. Olan seeks solace with his father and asks permission to seek his mother in Manila but his father forbids him from doing so. His desperation is compounded by the sudden death of fish in the pond that he’s maintaining as well as Lorie’s declaration that she prefers to terminate their union as husband and wife, burning their mementos of their happy times together.

Latay takes the unusual step of looking at gender trouble by proceeding from a reversal in straight relationships: the inflictor of violence is the woman, with the man performing the role of acceptor. The arrangement applies the national dynamic to the level of familial transactions, since the ignominious failure of the social experiment in Marcos Sr.’s plan to fast-track development via authoritarian means, led to a welcome shift in granting Philippine women greater roles in public and even global living—with the film itself acknowledging as much when it opens with Lorie preparing to leave for overseas work. The retention of the standard recognition of the male as still ultimately a more dangerous force, derived from relative physical capability, is responsibly maintained in the narrative. Olan’s passivity, paralleling the country’s experience, derives from a combination of humiliation (his extramarital affair becomes public knowledge) and opportunism (Lorie’s prospective earnings will relieve him of the anxiety of inadequate income generation); his prerogatives of initiating intimacy with his wife and recognizing the emergence of a rival still abide. By all accounts, it is Lorie who misjudges her rage as strength, although to elaborate further would be to ruin the process of discovery. The allegorizing with civil society may also have been far from Ralston Jover’s mind, but the danger for anyone in approaching and dealing with a battered male, especially in confined circumstances, will be recognizable to anyone sufficiently familiar with the Philippine character.

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Area

Language: Kapampangan
Additional Languages: Filipino, English
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Louie Ignacio [as Luisito Lagdameo Ignacio]
Screenwriter: Robby Tantingco
From a story by Ferdinand Lapuz
Producer: BG Productions International

Cast: AiAi delas Alas, Allen Dizon, Sue Prado, Sancho delas Alas, Ireen Cervantes, Sarah Pagcaliwagan, Tabs Sumulong, Eufrocina Peña, Cecile Yumul, Bambalito Lacap, Francisco Guinto, Rein Gutierrez, Eugene Garrett C. Euperio, Geraldo Dizon, Kim Duenas, Tin Velasco, Elizabeth Masangcay, Johnny Cabanlig, Tony Cabanlig, Dylan Ray Talon, Bong Ramos, Hernand Timoteo Tulud, Jennifer Cimagala, Vicky Vega-Cabigting, Boy Cayetano, Rustom Agustin, Christian Aquino, Bongjon Jose, Gerald Torrejs, Arnel Avila, Baby Go, Romeo Lindain

What used to be the most successful brothel north of Manila, set up for servicemen at Clark Air Base when it was still operated by the US Army, has now been reduced to a pitiful joint, its family owners earning their keep from a more reliable neighborhood convenience store. Eldest son Bren manages the hookers, assigning johns to them and ensuring they abide by the law. Hillary, who lost her son when she fled the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, is saving money so she can travel to the US to see him via his American father. Julie, whose looks make her the favorite of many customers, cannot afford to leave because she has to raise three children, with the older two acting as procurers. Bren’s mother, a former guerrilla fighter with the Hukbong Magpapalaya ng Bayan or People’s Liberation Army, had also seen better days as a sex worker and relates how rebel and counterinsurgency forces would observe a truce whenever they encountered each other in the brothel district, called Area. The approach of Holy Week brings about a decline in customers, so Bren focuses on soliciting residents and neighboring workers as well as taking the women to a clinic for their Pap smear test, and prepares for his annual vow of penance as a self-flagellant.

The mix of insurrectionist history, religious folk practice, and indigent sex work attains a surprising coherence in Area. Then again the element that brought everything together—American imperialist interest in the Southeast Asian region circa the Cold War—still overhangs Area’s area like the mushroom cloud that would have materialized if one of the military base’s nukes detonated for some reason or other. The Philippine government’s takeover of Clark Air Base in 1991 (after the eruption of the volcano that also led to one of the working girls seeking employment in the brothel) resulted in a decline in the businesses that originally sprouted to cater to American soldiers, now only a distant memory for folks old enough to have lived through it. The film relieves the pathos that inescapably suffuses the brothel’s shoddy, cramped, inadequately lit spaces, with walls so thin that children can hear their mother at work despite her co-workers’ efforts at maintaining sufficient prudence, by providing credible moments of levity, mostly centered on frank exchanges among the characters on the conditions of and hindrances to effective sex work. Even more fascinating is the brothel owners’ justification of insurrectionist activity, including their support for rebel militias, effectively pardoned since their leaders obtained clemency from Ferdinand Marcos Sr. The sex workers’ individual narratives though evince that the liberation their predecessors fought and died for never really materialized, although the film provides an unexpected personal culmination for Hillary, the most downtrodden among them. She’s also furnished with a revelation, a way by which human psychology copes with deep sorrow by reconfiguring it as passion. The shock of recognition when it arrives invites an entire host of responses, although the ultimate question of why such irrational processes are so rarely realized in film and literature guarantees that Area will always possess evidence that confronting discomforting questions, while generally useful in opening up new avenues for exploration, sometimes yields answers that everyday existence would be too opaque to grant.

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Boy Pick-Up: The Movie

Year of Release: 2012
Director: Dominic Zapata [as Dominic C. Zapata]
Screenwriter: Aloy Adlawan
(From a concept by Ogie Alcasid & Eri Neeman and a story by Ogie Alcasid & Aloy Adlawan)
Producers: GMA Films & Regal Entertainment

Cast: Ogie Alcasid, Solenn Heussaff, Dennis Trillo, Michael V., Antonio Aquitania, Diego Llorico, Eri Neeman, Boy 2 Quizon, Sam Pinto, Sarah Lahbati, Gwen Zamora, Jackie Rice, Maey Bautista, Albert Sumaya Jr., Roadfill, Moymoy, Pepe Smith, Lilia Cuntapay, Kerbie Zamora, Isko Salvador, Caesar Cosme, Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr., Jose Javier Reyes, Boy Abunda, Dingdong Dantes, Victor Aliwalas, Ellen Adarna, Ian Batherson, Kristoffer Martin, Adrian Alandy, Paolo Contis, Vicky Belo, Derek Ramsey, Loonie, Dello, Mike Swift, Reg Rubio, Rhon Henley, Apokz, Abra, Jonan Aguilar

Battle rap mutates into a variation where the contestants freestyle with pickup lines. The long-time winner by acclamation is Boy Pick-Up, who comes off as a doofus who somehow casts a spell whenever he delivers his winning dispatch. His rival Gabbs consoles himself by marrying his girlfriend Queen, but the latter’s so infatuated with Boy that she abandons her fiancé at the altar. The despondent Gabbs leaps into the Pasig River but is fished out by a masked manipulator who transforms him into Bagwis, Boy’s worst nemesis. Boy meanwhile resists his gay landlord Sharona and seeks a job, finally finding it at Heaven’s Bakeshop when he prepares his irresistible fishcake. The shop owner Angel is typically besotted with Boy from first hello, but Bagwis returns to steal her away in order to sabotage Boy’s supremacy in the battle rap competition.

The TV mainstay Bubble Gang has been around for longer than most of its viewers’ lifetimes (three decades and counting) so that it’s easy for older audiences to assume that its purpose ends with the entertainment it dispenses. The disappointing performance of the film adaptation of its otherwise satisfying satirical segment featuring a parentally unsupervised rich daughter and her beleaguered though sexually amorous nanny, titled Yaya and Angelina: The Spoiled Brat Movie (dir. Michael Tuviera, 2019), was not so much a reflection of the source’s limitations as it was further proof of the difficulty of crossover attempts from TV to cinema. By confining itself to the TV property’s elements—including unexpected guest stars, with the late rock legend Pepe Smith’s definitive film appearance—and punching up its potential for spectacle, Boy Pick-Up winds up revealing the tension between forcing a Western cultural innovation to address a developing country’s occasionally imperviable concerns. Proof of the approach’s effectiveness lies in how Boy Pick-Up results in a more holistic unit than the millennium’s other significant battle rap film, Treb Monteras II’s Respeto (Respect, 2017), although then again, it might be able to accommodate the latter’s allegorical ambition only with far more difficulty. Satire has nevertheless rarely been this rewarding since the departure of our Second Golden Age experts, so both films may be counted as essential twinbill immersions in a working-class culture that might not be around for too long from now.

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Kahit Butas ng Karayom … Papasukin Ko

English Translation: I Will Go Through Even the Eye of the Needle
Year of Release: 1995
Directors: Fernando Poe Jr. & Willy Milan [as Ronwaldo Reyes & Wilfredo “Willy” Milan]
Screenwriters: Eddie Romero & Manny Palo
Producer: Libran Films

Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Bing Loyzaga, Subas Herrero, Paquito Diaz, Roy Alvarez, Lito Legaspi, Bing Davao, Caridad Sanchez, Roberto Garcia, Luis Gonzales, Sunshine Dizon, Mona Margarita, Jimmy Garcia, Rex Lapid, Ernie David, Tony Bernal, Danny Riel, Bobby Benitez, Rolly Lapid, Nonoy de Guzman, Jonathan Gabriel, Bert Garon, Bong Varona, Jess Vargas

Taking his young daughter to school, Sgt. Daniel Torres nearly hits the car of a spoiled rich kid, who complains to his father about the incident. The father wants to have Sgt. Torres killed as punishment, but his superior, a colonel awaiting promotion to general, arranges to have him and his family assigned to the conflict in Mindanao instead. Along the way, Sgt. Torres stops extortionists from victimizing a Muslim, Halim. Upon arrival, he finds that the men assigned to him behave abusively, so he whips them into shape by a combination of brawn and proper behavior. Rina, his daughter’s new teacher, takes an interest in him, but he also has to contend with a corrupt mayor and hypocritical officials, a disgruntled Muslim populace (led, as it turns out, by Halim), and rapacious business interests from faraway Manila.

With Fernando Poe Jr. gone, it will take another star of equivalent stature and influence before a more definitive commercial film on the Mindanao conflict can be accomplished. Nevertheless with Kahit Butas ng Karayom … Papasukin Ko, we can still count our blessings. The Willy Milan co-directing credit might make us brace for another relentless onslaught of machismo, compounded by issues of war and religious difference, but FPJ’s growing acknowledgment of feminine values enables him to set apart a hero who actually has moments of masculine tenderness, particularly in his fondness for his unruly, zany, yet suicidally plucky dirty-dozen squad. With Eddie Romero in their final collab, he finally had the epic scope of Romero’s hidebound Aguila (1980) and the careful focus on character of Ang Padrino (The Godfather, 1984, which he directed), with much less of Romero’s usual humanistic fence-sitting, possibly owing to the credit shared with Manny Palo. From hereon we also witness an elderly action star actually behaving his age, allowing his young daughter to outdo him in the manospheric enterprise of auto repair, and giving up when overpowered in a brawl so he can later resort to the same dirty trick his opponent utilized. But where he commits himself to the oppressed is where the unexpected takes place: the heartfelt and frankly romantic pledge in the film title is uttered by his army-commander character Daniel Torres not to any family or professional associate but to a Muslim rebel leader, upon confirming that the latter is fighting for his people’s rights against the encroachment of folks primarily represented by the likes of Sgt. Torres himself. The ultimately frustrating aspect of KBKPK is that satisfactory endings, even open-ended ones, can only occur in pop culture; but stars worth their salt can lead the way and leave it up to the rest of us to follow.

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Dagitab

English Title: Sparks
Year of Release: 2014
Director & Screenwriter: Giancarlo Abrahan
Producers: Cinemalaya Foundation & Ten17P

Cast: Eula Valdez, Nonie Buencamino, Martin del Rosario, Sandino Martin, Max Eigenmann, Frances Ignacio, Ronnie Lazaro, Rolando Inocencio, Valentin Naguit, Misha Lecaros, Ryan Peter Judd, Whammy Alcazaren, Chris Gallegos, Al Bernard Garcia, Vic Robinson, Ness Roque, Jovita Laureola, Marvin Gomez

Issey and Jimmy, both academics, have been married long enough for their colleagues’ children to be in college. Jimmy takes rural field trips to finalize his dissertation on a folkloric muse, but he also asks about Lorena, a woman fighter who disappeared with no one able to pinpoint her whereabouts; a rebel commander who knows his and Lorena’s shared history tells him to give up his quest. Issey knows that Jimmy’s research is a contrivance—that he’s actually seeking closure with his old flame, who left him to join the insurgent army. Indulging in cigarettes and alcohol, she attends an out-of-town workshop as a facilitator, where her friend’s son Gab, avoiding his roommate’s same-sex advances, bonds with her. Although aware of the ethical complications, Issey’s disappointment in her marriage impels her to allow Gab’s interest to acquire erotic attributes.

Over a decade since its initial appearance, Dagitab found new life in a stage adaptation. The film itself had an ambivalent critical reception, as observable in the various critics organizations’ indicators of appreciation: set aside (except for performance trophies) by the oldest group, declared “best first film” by the late-millennium group, and wholly embraced by the newest (and only non-academic) group in its annual survey. One can immediately comprehend where the hesitation of older evaluators would arise from: the film grapples with the dynamics of a radical movement that abided for nearly half a century, that originated from personalities identified with the national university, and that continues to influence its constituents’ deliberations on policy and aesthetics. In this context, one might ascribe the film’s silence on the movement’s defining upheaval, a schism that led to the formation and eventual strengthening of breakaway groups, to the filmmaker’s possible youthfulness. Yet a closer tracking of the male professor’s obsession with a former lover, whose disappearance during active service in the people’s army may or may not have been a consequence of its tragically rampageous anti-infiltration campaign, raises the further issue, as expressed by the filmmaker, of the male character’s “mythopoliticizing” the woman’s disappearance, “because otherwise her ‘death’ would not have been as sublime as someone who loved her could hope for” (Facebook Messenger reply, October 24, 2025). And the fact that the rebel-army commander he queries refuses to provide him with a useful account (perhaps to own the woman’s narrative, or protect his own feelings for her) suggests the standard allegorizing of the nation, or at least an idealized aspect of it, being imposed again on the figure of the woman. Without attempting to spoil any first-time appreciator’s viewing experience, we can read further into the handling of the wife’s discontent using gender as a means of critique—i.e., between the two academic protagonists, she’s the one who gets laid in real life, and her stud, after enduring the male prof’s retaliatory attempt at intimidation, will still be able to hope for further sexual liberation. The use of sexual exclusion as a means of indicating where a storyteller’s sympathies lie is a narrative tactic closely associated with contemporary Euro-Latin material, but to see it deployed in Pinas culture, with its Euro-Latinate roots, is to realize how much potential still lies in pathways we might have too readily abandoned for the sake of Americanization.

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Sila-Sila

English Title: The Same People
Year of Release: 2019
Director: Giancarlo Abrahan
Screenwriter: Daniel Saniana
Producers: ABS-CBN Film Productions, Quiapo Collective, UP Cinema Arts Society

Cast: Gio Gahol, Topper Fabregas, Dwein Baltazar, Phi Palmost, Bart Guingona, Kych Minemoto, Vincent Kevin Pajara, Meann Espinosa, Jay Gonzaga, Sunshine Teodoro, Adrienne Vergara, Thea Marabut, Juan Miguel Severo, Lin Javier, Jasmine Curtis-Smith, Wilson Tenama, Rainier Carreon, Justin Hernandez, Maureen Gonzales, Daniel Morial, Daniel Saniana, Ilsa Malsi, Apa Agbayani, JL Javier, Marvin Matias, Gaye Angeles, Boo Gabunada

Gabriel and Jared, friends since college, are unable to recover from what Gab calls Jared’s betrayal when the former sees the latter’s flirtation on a dating app. He leaves the city to work at an interisland capital and returns after a couple of years to attend a college reunion. Goaded along by mutual friends, Gab attempts to resume communicating with Jared but his ex is still sore over his sudden departure and they wind up quarreling again. Matters get more complicated when Gab is promoted by the non-governmental organization where he works but the higher position happens to be a vacancy … back in the same distant place he fled to. He also entertains various degrees of entanglements with straight men, with Jared happening on the presence in his bedroom of a married man he’d been sleeping with and consequently having his own turn at a jealous fit.

After local culture had taken a womanly direction following the humiliating failure of the grand masculinist experiment of martial rule by Ferdinand Marcos Sr., filmmakers realized that they no longer had to resort to camp or negative imaging in order to present queer characters onscreen. The still-unsatisfactory positive characterization may have been intended to justify the espousal of same-sex intercourse—successful enough, despite reactionary gripes, to initiate postqueer storytelling in Philippine cinema. What might surprise observers still fixated on the premillennial valuations of dimorphic differentation and observance of socially designated gender roles is how, as exemplified in Sila-Sila, local queer subjects have assimilated Western best practice, possibly exceeding global models by enabling the rest of “straight” culture to arrive at a workable rapprochement with the community. The film in fact not only dispenses with the expected consummation of copulation scenes; it also casts a surprisingly critical perspective on Gab, its central character, who’s inclined to flee rather than confront conflicts (termed “ghosting” in social-media parlance, per a clarification on December 14, 2025, from the director via Facebook Messenger regarding the film’s misleading summary at the Internet Movie Database), engages in the promiscuity that he abhors in others, and insists on teasing cis-het males to the point where he succeeds in seducing a married man. SS’s feat lies in demonstrating the psychological motives behind Gab’s resistance to queer culture’s prescriptions, withholding moralist judgment while also indicating how his self-absorption becomes a source of frustration for people who genuinely love him. One might be invited to make correspondences between his long journey to self-understanding and the national condition of a young country that still seems incapable of maturation, but that might be a challenge better left to more appropriate social-science experts.

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Lupang Pangako [incomplete]

English Translation: Promised Land
Year of Release: 1949
Director: Susana C. de Guzman
Screenwriters: Quin Velasco & Susana C. de Guzman
(From a story by Susana C. de Guzman)
Producer: LVN Pictures

Cast: Leopoldo Salcedo, Mila del Sol, Eusebio Gomez, Tinno de Lara, Engracio Ibarra, Armando Canseco, Lila Luna, Maria Norma, Vita Ortega, Horacio Morelos, Felipe Ortega, Amado Rivera Jr., Bayani Casimiro, Angge, Pablo Vergara

[Note: spoilers provided] Wandering the streets of Manila, Capt. Eduardo Rosales, a World War II veteran, finds an army buddy pretending to be a blind beggar. After introducing himself, they walk together and discover another former fellow soldier busking on the sidewalk, with two kids whom he pretends to be his own; the busker dismisses the kids with the money they collected but regrets his generosity when Eddie admits he’s broke. They proceed to meet still another of their mates who operates a small eatery, where Eddie discloses that he was just discharged from a hospital after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. He tells the group that he has to inform the parents of their late comrade of the death of their son. While walking to their distant provincial home, where they work as tenants, he gets hit by the car of Cora, the spoiled orphaned heiress, who gets out and scolds him. On his way to the tenants’ home, he faints before Cora’s residence, where she learns about his terminal condition. But since she was guaranteed ownership of the family property only if she gets married, she offers Eddie some money if he agrees to a sham union. Eddie successfully negotiates for a higher price plus use of a fertile tract of land, and invites his comrades to form a farming cooperative, calling the place Lupang Pangako (Promised Land). He also thwarts the unscrupulous designs of Cora’s suitor, who pretends to still be wealthy so he could marry her and claim her wealth for himself. Cora berates Eddie when she realizes that her own tenants are abandoning their work on the farm in order to join his cooperative, but he insists on his husbandly prerogative and forces her to live in a farmhouse. With the help of women farmhands, Cora discovers the appeal of living directly off the land and attends a community celebration as one of her people. Missing portion (from “Lupang Pangako,” Melcore’s CinePlex Blog, November 16, 2020): Cora’s family doctor visits the couple, treats Eddie’s condition, and finally declares that Eddie has fully recovered. The couple realize that their pragmatic arrangement was the right one for each of them after all, and agree to live in wedded bliss in the company of tenants who have become their equals.

The first Filipina director of note, Susana C. de Guzman’s credentials were aspersion-proof. The clan she belonged to was famed not for wealth but for tremendous talent, so it was no surprise that after she retired from filmmaking, two of her nephews would commence their film careers—director Ishmael Bernal and composer George Canseco. Her brother Constancio’s music was always better than the films he worked on, though fortunately he scored several of her films including the current one. Her uncles Severino Reyes and Lope K. Santos (whose K was the Tagalog spelling for Canseco) were colossi of nationalist literature, so the question should not be why Lupang Pangako turned out to be so exceptional that it deserves to be canonized despite its missing last sequence, but why she detoured shortly afterward into wholly dismissible fodder. Meanwhile her own novelistic skill and Marxist sympathies render LP a cut above most other Philippine samples, with its exposition favorably comparable to the similar opening portion of Yu Hyun-mok’s Obaltan (Aimless Bullet, 1961), also a treatise on the consequences of war from the perspective of ordinary citizens. And rather than allow the shrewish heiress to be tamed by her disciplinarian husband, as the Brit bard would have handled it, de Guzman allocates the task to the plantation tenants’ womenfolk. The film’s missing portion only covers the solution to the plot’s primary setback, namely its male lead’s terminal illness, so in fact the entire work resembles a genuine socialist realist text, all the more extraordinary for showing up in a US neocolonial stronghold.[1] [Important tech note: Several LVN films, including a few listed in this volume, were transferred using the inexpensive method of telerecording—i.e., projecting celluloid material on a screen and recording the sound and image with a video camera, resulting in flickery images; as of this time, no institution has volunteered to take charge of repairing this problem.]

Note

[1] A cogent summary of Susana C. de Guzman’s prodigious clan is provided in Bayani Santos Jr.’s “[Ishmael] Bernal as Auteur: Primary Biographical Notes” (in Kritika Kultura, vol. 19, August 2012, pp. 14–35). The likeliest reason for the crackdown on progressive expressions in cinema would be her studio’s enthusiastic participation, via its owner’s son Manuel de Leon, in the US State Department’s intervention in the film cultural policies of the Southeast Asian region even through the 1960s, after the other countries had lost interest (Lee Sangjoon, Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network, Cornell University Press, 2020, p. 12). Re socialist realism, a warning I sounded out elsewhere: a Philippine film author, whose points were endorsed by a Western author, nesciently claimed that the two most significant city films of the Second Golden Age, Lino Brocka’s Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Light, 1975) and Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night (1980), were samples of socialist realism. One can only hope these purportedly progressive Orthodox-left experts have since read up on historical trends in global cinema and readjusted their clownish misperceptions.

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Brutus, ang Paglalakbay

English Translation: Brutus, the Journey
Additional Language: Buhid
Year of Release: 2008
Director: Tara Illenberger
Screenwriters: Tara Illenberger & Arah Jell Badayos
Producers: Bonfire Productions, Cinemalaya Foundation, National Commission for Culture and the Arts

Cast: Ronnie Lazaro, Yul Servo, Rhea Medina, Timothy Castillo, Flor Salanga, Melario Nazareno, Jerey Aguilar, Irene Medina, Lagum Pasag, Yagum Maansig Solina, Aniway Solina, “Mayor” Yaum Sumbad, Mandy Sumbad, Tulay Yam-an, Ian Pagcaliwagan, Drandred Afundar, Fritz Silorio, Oyot Solina, Jimmy Rodaje, Jayvee Lachica, Raymond Abia, Charisse Pagcaliwagan, Jopeter Galicha, McDaniel Famisaran, Charles Kim Pagcaliwagan, Benjamin Jovinal, Marianne Oandasan, Roland Pagcaliwagan, Ramy Gadon, Jaimie Lazo, Christopher Arsega, Dennis Alegre, Sarah Pagcaliwagan, Randy Salibio, Ariel Molina, Arlan Lachica, Richner Solangan, Alfredo Mabalot, Leonises Feticio, Jim Augie Bergado, Japhset A. Bahian, Sonny Gado

When her father falls ill from malaria, Payang Mansik is instructed by her mother to accompany Adag Ayan to perform brutus—i.e., transporting wood for illegal loggers from Manila, so she can earn enough money to buy medicine in their Oriental Mindoro town. Payang also looks forward to finding her brother, who went missing after an earlier brutus task, unusual for members of their Buhid tribe of indigenous Mangyan folk. After hauling the logs down a mountain, they construct a raft so they can paddle on the way to town. Although Adag warns that the current is getting stronger, Payang insists on going further, resulting in their raft crashing against some rocks. In the morning, having drifted away from their deliverables, they are picked up by an army unit led by Sgt. Sarosa, who asks them if they had seen a rebel leader named Ka Milo. Sarosa warns them that performing brutus is illegal, but he also tells them where they can find the logs they lost. While reassembling the raft, a stranger who introduces himself as Carlito helps them in exchange for hitching a ride.

The neorealist social-problem film, largely repressed during the increasingly prohibitive cost of film production during the late celluloid era, made a comeback via the transition to digital filmmaking. Its proportion was more abundant in Pinas than in Western cinema, largely owing to media critics and teachers romanticizing the output of artists identified with the antidictatorship movement during the martial-law period’s Second Golden Age. While some of these titles garnered attention, even prizes, in global events, no one dared to voice the possibility of affirmative action at play, or even their insidious insistence that what used to be called Third World subjects should confine themselves to political miserabilism, resulting in a reactionary downgrading of the local audience that would have horrified SGA practitioners.[1] Brutus demonstrates how smart filmmakers could observe these requisites and thereby win the approval of funding agencies, but also figure out ways to improve on the formula. The work’s title is derived from the hardy though now-discontinued 140cc Kawasaki motorcycle used for hauling logs uphill, a term exclusive to the Buhid tribe featured in the film (per a Facebook Messenger response by the filmmaker); it commences like every other neorealist-inspired work, through which a line may be traced all the way to the output of the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the trend’s primary contemporary exponents. Yet though Brutus diverts through the expected worrisome and increasingly stressful developments, it insists even more stubbornly on a light-handed, even tender depiction of its dramatis personae, even the most threatening and dangerous ones. It’s an unusual perspective, feminine in its most empowering sense, although those who may have traversed the many possible routes through which lifestyles caught in the crosshairs of capitalist and militaristic pressures find their own resistance in maintaining the distance and wonderment that so-called primitive cultures provide, will be able to recognize the behavioral patterns depicted in the film. Lyrical realism was supposed to be one of the traditions that neorealism meant to improve on, if not displace; Brutus makes us see how approaches faithful to the sensibilities of sufficiently Othered subjects can provide their own vindication in the face of more pragmatic but overused options.

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High Tide

Language: Hiligaynon
Year of Release: 2017
Director & Screenwriter: Tara Illenberger [as Tara Barrera Illenberger][2]
Producers: Bonfire Productions, Dark Media Creations, Universal Harvester

Cast: Arthur Solinap, Dalin Sarmiento, Sunshine Teodoro, Forrest Kyle Buscto, Christine Mary Demaisip, Riena Christal Shin, Nathan Sotto, Onal Golez, Allen Rivera Galindo, Allain Hablo, Runshien Olivete, Mitch Fresnillo, Kyle Fermindoza, Christian Demaisip, Farida Kabayao, Dianna Baloran, Joan Paulette, Mary Libo-on, Edwin Caro-Lauran Jr., Ma. Luisa Nalupano, Elvie B. Razon-Gonzales, Emilyn Espera, Genina Toledo, Jeremy Descuatan, Wenil Bautista, Melita Penafiel, Daniella Julieta Caro, Tracy Baky, Jocelyn dela Cruz, Jennifer Tobongbanwa, EJ Mier, Stephanie Rodriguez, Joemel Banas, Harlen Grace Esmajer, Leonard Villanueva, Rafael Dionio, Genie Delareman, Jeffrey Dilag, Ignacio Dumancas, Lily Belle Palma, Ivan Kenjie Villalobos, Roshiel Fernandez, Zahara Shane Lino, Allen Rivera Galindo, Jeson Panes, Lily Belle Palma, Mark Joseph Magada, James Gulles, Josh Berso, Jeren Sola, Zedric Bacolena, Ivan Kenjie Villalobos, Rynshien Olivete, Marilou Doloritos, Jade Claire Villa, Prince Jarandilla, Leo Quiachon, Mereyel Salvacion

Young sisters Dayday and Laila are sent to school by their fisherfolk parents despite their hand-to-mouth existence on an island in Iloilo. When disaster strikes a neighboring island, their neighbor Mercy agrees to adopt a boy, Unyok, who’d lost both his parents and barely speaks as a result of trauma. The sisters develop a bond with Unyok, with whom they scrounge for shellfish on the beach to sell directly to a restaurant, but the proprietor complains because the sizes of the mollusks they harvest are too small. When the sisters’ mother is diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy and they need to raise funds beyond their means, the three stop attending school and look for ways to help. Unyok remembers how the sea harvest where he used to live was always plentiful, so he convinces the sisters to go there during low tide and return to their island before the tide rises.

Climate change is the impassive and increasingly destructive force that confronts the most dispossessed citizens everywhere, with the Philippines already marked by meteorologists as the most vulnerable country in the world. Much like the issue of the nuclear arms race in the twentieth century, this ensures an existentialist pessimism in any discourse where the prospect might arise. Hence the expression of any form of hope, as High Tide endeavors to furnish, might sound like whistling in the dark. Yet the film manages to exempt its narrative’s future generation from the defeatism that we know lies in store for them—ironically by focusing on its future generation. To witness them already battered by the ravages of the natural environment, when previously tried and tested measures like calendrical almanacs and miniature timepieces no longer function as they should, yet insist on persevering for the sake of their loved ones and for one another, is to imagine them carving out enough space for their fantasy to prevail, if only in fiction. This makes of High Tide that rarity among independent productions: a work rooted in solid scientific findings and closely observed ethnographic reality, that nevertheless refuses to drown in harsh and overwhelming data. It will make sense primarily for characters like the ones who populate its story, but within a framework where no winners can be guaranteed, the attempt may be seen as possibly desperate, but heroic in its desperation.

Notes

[1] The differences between Fredric Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad actually began with the former’s discursive appreciation of a Filipino film, Kidlat Tahimik’s Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare, 1977): in “‘Art Naïf’ and the Admixture of Worlds,” the final chapter of The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Indiana University Press, 1992, pp. 186–213), Jameson argued that Third-World films essentially present as political allegories, refining an argument he first articulated in “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (Social Text, vol. 15, Fall 1986, pp. 65–88); Ahmad, in “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’” (Social Text, vol. 17, Fall 1987, pp. 3–25), spearheaded the response of several cultural critics, some of them understandably from Pinas, in pointing out how Jameson had to suppress “the multiplicity of significant difference among and within both the advanced capitalist countries and the imperialized formations.” For a tracking of the critical shortcomings that led to this state of affairs, see Joel David, “From Cloud to Resistance,” Amateurish (August 30–September 13, 2022), uploaded in three installments starting at amauteurish.com/2022/08/30/the-problem-of-our-critical-approaches/.

[2] The landgrabbing family in the director’s 2008 film Brutus, ang Paglalakbay is introduced as “Barrera.” The filmmaker speculated that she probably associated her maternal grandfather’s name with the issue of land: “Friends’ and family members’ names show up in my films…. My grandfather was not landed. He was a soldier in the war. But later he became a successful businessman. And people would borrow money from him, offering their small land titles. And that’s how he acquired property, some of which he didn’t really want” (Facebook Messenger reply, October 17, 2025).

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Iskalawags

English Translations: Scalawags; Rascals
Language: Cebuano
Additional Languages: Filipino, English
Year of Release: 2013
Director: Keith Deligero
Screenwriters: Keith Deligero, Gale Osorio, Remton Siega Zuasola
(From Erik Tulban’s story “Kapayas [Papayas]”)
Producer: Deligero & Co.

Cast: Kerwin Otida, Reynaldo Formentera, Windel Otida, Johnreil Lunzaga, Joriel Lunzaga, Micko Maurillo, Mark Lourence Montalban, Jeric Raval, Dionne Monsanto, Michelle Acain, Mariah Gonzaga, Marcheta Ortiz, Narciso Dizon, Rey Samaco, Ramil Alcordo, Edwina Alcordo, Jobert Lucero, Pina Gonzaga, Robertson Tampus, Erik Tuban, Keith Deligero, Lawrence Ang, Fel Louise Alingasa, Jerome Villamor

In Barrio Malinawon, an islandic town in Cebu, seven male friends can’t wait for school to end so they can hang out, talk about movies starring their idol Jeric Raval, and embark in new adventures in one another’s company. Led by their self-appointed leader Palot (who claimed precedence over the rest by being first among them to grow pubic hair), they adopt the loanword iskalawag, which was used as the title of a popular action entry. They set as their goal the acquisition of humongous papayas they heard were growing in the garden of their teacher Ma’am Lina, but along the way they live out typical teenage hijinks mostly from the pursuit of illicit thrills, replicating their classmates’ admired declamations in Filipino by mouthing dignified populist speeches uttered by Fernando Poe Jr. in Asedillo (Celso Ad. Castillo, 1971) and in Hindi Ka Na Sisikatan ng Araw: Kapag Puno Na ang Salop, Part III (The Sun Won’t Rise for You: When the Container is Full, Part III, Pablo Santiago, 1990). The appearance of the flesh-and-blood Jeric Raval to attend to his personal businesses as Ma’am Lina’s military husband demonstrates the power that their imagination holds over reality.

The exemplary final chapter of Bliss Cua Lim’s The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (Duke University Press, 2024) contains as exhaustive a reading of Iskalawags as anyone can ask for. To the casual viewer, the film might appear to be a takeoff from the feel-good multicharacter youth films of the Second Golden Age. But then it goes way beyond the realist premise that typified those products. The closest to a Milinawon territory anywhere is a small district in Mindanao, and even the preteen poem “Sa Aking mga Kabatà (To My Fellow Youth),” ascribed to Rizal and recited from memory in the characters’ classroom, is considered a false attribution by historians, thus challenging standard notions of reality premised on acceptability. Drawn from director Keith Deligero’s autobiographical experience, the Iskalawags narrative moves temporally back and forth in retelling a formative event in the shared lives of its gang of seven, until it flashforwards to an indeterminate future with the story’s narrator en route to an uncertain destination. Lim points out how certain details in the film’s design may be anachronistically outmoded or advanced, although in the use of Betamax technology, Deligero himself interjected to point out how a technological trend considered passé in imperial Manila denotes prosperity in the margins for people who have no other means to access the pop culture they crave, in the government-prescribed language they have to study. Iskalawags also stakes more than a linguistic claim to Cebuano cinema: the celluloid-era products from the region fiercely partook of genre appropriations, in contrast with the Europeanesque-arty approaches marshaled by the digital-era generation who might have been too eager to distance themselves from the commercialist anxieties of their predecessors. Iskalawags could be more comfortably situated with, to name a rare available sample, Joe Macachor’s Ang Manok ni San Pedro (St. Peter’s Rooster, 1977), a comedy, originally shot in super-8mm. in order to provide the region with its first color film, where an easy-going peasant gets killed by a rival for a woman but is rewarded in heaven with a magical gamecock. Iskalawags’s fantastic counterpart arrives when Jeric Raval, the title gang’s movie idol, materializes as the husband of the teacher whose papayas they covet, but stumbles upon her after his counterinsurgency activities, during her moment of indiscretion with a younger lover. The kids suddenly witness everything as members of an outdoor-screening audience, perhaps as a way for them to frame the traumatizing event that was about to unfold before their voyeuristic eyes. In managing to maintain its tonal equanimity to this point and beyond, Iskalawags enables us to think through the many implications of its plot and purpose.

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Lily

Language: Cebuano
Additional Languages: Filipino, Hiligaynon, Japanese, English
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Keith Deligero
Screenwriters: Pam Miras, Timmy Harn, Keith Deligero
Script Consultant: Dodo Dayao
Producers: 8thumbs, Bards sa Kasamahan, Heritage Productions

Cast: Rocky Salumbides, Charlton Dano, Shaina Magdayao, Rey Samaco, Natileigh Sitoy, Enrie Estevez, Mikka Cabreras, Chrystal Alesna, Sunshine Lim, Georgette Nunag, Gurprit Singh, Kathleen Pador, Niña Igot-Makipig, Nicole Blackman, Tuesday Zabala, Zalde Lapiña, Ligaya Rabago, Edwina Alcordo, Gale Osorio, Chloe Novie Solasco, Darcy Arguedo, Baby Boy Arellano, Jvi James Luib, Ruel Dahis Antipuesto, Lawrence Ang, Gladys Areopagita, Ronnie Gamboa Jr., Ric Rodrigo Porminal Jr., Denzel Yorong, Hesus Deligero, Ramil Alcordo, Juvel Alvarez, Mario Lowell Baring, Anecito Disuacido, Charles Lim, Fel Louise Alingasa, Romy Warain, Earl Vincent Ramirez, Lav Diaz, Eula Valdez, Remton Siega Zuasola

In hunting for a sigbin, a mythological creature regarded as an aswang’s (native vampire’s) pet, Mario Ungo is distracted by Lily, who hides him in her convent after he suffers a mysterious injury. Mario falls in love and lives with Lily. Although not averse to participating in criminal activity, he’s forced to kill a burglary victim, then claims that he will be unable to provide adequately for Lily and their child if he stays put. Despite Lily’s protestations, he decides to migrate for work in Manila, where he is reduced to servitude in the employ of better-off people. At one point in his job as security guard of a plush subdivision, he winds up killing an arrogant driver. He also falls for Jane, a nightclub dancer, and they cohabit when she gets pregnant. Lily however has also set out for Manila to find him, her face displaying an unsightly self-inflicted scar.

Lily is an example of what we might term a maximalist approach to filmmaking, as opposed to minimalism. Such a project would necessarily turn on the sustenance of paradoxes, starting with the association of this strategy with the big-budget pursuit of presenting as many elements as possible in order to attract the greatest number of viewers; the fact that the project is not just independently sourced, but regionally centered as well, may have therefore put off evaluators when it first arrived. The film advances itself with an audacity that can be better understood by going over its director’s fairly recent output. Preferring to immerse in genre expression rather than art consciousness, Keith Deligero first tinkered with elements of suspense and the prison film in Kordero sa Dios (Lamb of God, 2012) as well as comedy and the youth film in Iskalawags (Scalawags, 2013). With Lily, he furnished the usual elements of horror closely associated with rural settings by Philippine audiences, but incorporated the most innovative technical devices ever seen in a local sample of the genre, exceeding the peak achievements of older, mostly gone specialists. Major characters’ appearances shift sometimes in the same scene (complete with a nervy reversal of roles in a Catholic confessional), and the erratic, discontinuous, occasionally repetitious cutting provides a distinctly cinematic experience of uncanny disorientation in the narrative’s reality effect (described by Deligero in an email response as “like putting back pieces of the mirror that Lily broke in one scene”). As if seeking to further top off this already formidable challenge, Deligero introduces an inside joke that keeps advancing toward external dimensions: the male character starts out wearing a jacket inscribed with the director’s regional film festival, and reveals a T-shirt after being felled by an unidentified assailant, on which the director’s previous film title is displayed. At a peak horrific point much later, the entire production aesthetic suddenly turns conventional, in the best way our most accomplished filmmakers could execute; the reflexive twist, too delightful to divulge, should be left up to curious explorers to discover. Underlying the entire situation is the profound and melancholy pathos of rural natives grappling with the prospect of permanent poverty by seeking better prospects in the metropolitan capital and discovering there how their status is even further downgraded; the native female, already oppressed in her local habitat, experiences twice the degradation, even if she happens to possess supernatural abilities. In a perfect world, a talent such as Deligero’s should be deluged with offers—a prospect that may yet arrive, if we can fix our deeply flawed critical mechanisms.

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A Short History of a Few Bad Things

Language: Cebuano
Additional Languages: Filipino, English
Year of Release: 2018
Director: Keith Deligero
Screenwriter: Paul Grant
Producers: Binisaya Movement, ABS-CBN Film Productions, Cinema One Originals

Cast: Victor Neri, Jay Gonzaga, Publio Briones III, Maricel Sombrio, Kent Divinagracia, Hesus Deligero, Rey Samaco, Arnel Mardoquio, Julius Augustus Ambrad, Felicismo Alingasa, Ryles Cameron, Mel Baquiran, Remton Siega Zuasola, Crezzo Paz, Vitto Neri, Shiela Hontingoy, Fe Louise Alingasa, Alieza Despojo, Keith Deligero, Nony Pador, Alice Castro Dizon, Bebot Arias, Minerva Gerodias, Eric Bico, Zeny Nepomoceno

Felix Tarongoy and Jay are described by Ouano, their perpetually highly strung chief, as an ideal police investigation team for being smart and handsome respectively. Despite strict orders to follow their supervisor’s instructions and report to him at every turn, Felix interrogates witnesses to the drive-by assassination of a prominent local businessman in Cebu and identifies Tito Abog, an ex-military officer, as suspect. He proceed’s to the latter’s well-off residence and makes the acquaintance of Maria, Tito’s sullen, intimidated wife. Tito confronts Felix and Jay in Ouano’s office, confirming his and Felix’s background in counterinsurgency operations, and threatens Felix with retaliation for discounting their shared past. Running into Maria in public, Felix finds out from her that Tito’s plantation worker also witnessed the killing. Just when Felix thinks he’ll be able to solve the crime, a series of new killings throw more mysteries his way, making him fear for Maria’s safety.

A Short History of a Few Bad Things will resemble a light workout after the complex gymnastics of Lily. In fact, as studies of Classical Hollywood affirm, its genre consistency and singular vision are deceptive properties that could easily trip up less-prepared practitioners. The script of ASHFBT benefits from the contribution of a well-schooled outsider who took up residence in a regional center and participated in academic challenges, acquiring fluency in the native language along the way.[1] Since the Communist Party of the Philippines observes Maoist prescriptions, the protracted guerrilla war it has waged for way over half a century finds its way into the country’s most dispossessed rural territories, with counterinsurgency soldiers often opting to retire early due to the trauma of combat operations. ASHFBT leans on the tragic irony of the most idealistic members of the Philippine armed forces, who would otherwise have proved heroic fighters in the people’s war, being understandably regarded as no different from their less-scrupulous comrades by those who survived their offensive maneuvers. The apparently serial attacks that erupt midway in the narrative could thereby be read in this context, but the film grounds itself in the anxious, conscientious, yet outwardly impassive delivery of Victor Neri, far removed form his teen-idol appearances, redolent of Jaime de la Rosa in Gregorio Fernandez’s Cold War spy caper Kontrabando (Contraband, 1950), minus any hint of smarm. The performance assists in recuperating whatever cynicism might prevail in the material: good intentions will never guarantee positive outcomes, but the moral clarity they provide does make for powerful storytelling. In an interview with Bliss Cua Lim, Keith Deligero described Iskalawags, Lily, and ASHFBT as comprising “an incidental trilogy on the politics of languages,” and definite as ASHFBT‘s formal departure from the other two might seem, its counterfeit final titles ironically represent a more triumphant resolution than its actual closing credits.

Note

[1] Essential disclosure: Professor Paul Grant once interviewed me regarding canonization activities, a way in which this capsule review potentially catalyzes its own mise en abyme, for those inclined to reflect on reflexive activities. See Paul Douglas Grant, “The Transnational Pastime: An Interview with Joel David,” Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society, vol. 14, no. 1, June 2017, pp. 135–145. In returning full circle to the topic of Cebuano movies, Grant is better known as co-author (with Misha Boris Anissimov) of Lilas: An Illustrated History of the Golden Ages of Cebuano Cinema (University of San Carlos Press, 2016). A related issue is that the term proposed by Grant and Anissimov in place of “regional cinema” is “vernacular cinema,” which Keith Deligero also strongly prefers inasmuch as, per Bliss Cua Lim, “it exposes the provincialism of Manila culture and the unacknowledged linguistic ethnocentrism that its long-unchallenged dominance fosters” (“Binisaya: Archival Power and Vernacular” chapter in The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema, Duke University Press, 2024). While radically ideal, however, such a semantic adjustment would be tantamount to a displacement of nearly all the other categories and premises in Philippine cinema, so it should first be applied in a comprehensive account of non-Manila film production.

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