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Aberya

Additional Language: Cebuano
English Translation: Hitch
Year of Release: 2012
Director: Christian Linaban
Screenwriters: Christian Linaban & Ara Chawdhury
(Inspired by a short screenplay by Ariel Llanto)
Producers: Cinema One Originals, Dream Arts Productions, Epicmedia Productions

Cast: Will Devaughn, Mercedes Cabral, Nicholas Varela, Iwa Moto, Publio Briones III, Gil Maningo, Marilou Lucente, Winsse Villanueva, Jeffrey Ogario, Ralph Padilla, Gabby Nazareno, Syrel Lopez, Darling Dame, Ione Blanche Enriquez, Ara Chawdhury, Steph Jarina, Paolo Varela, Alex Uypuanco, Bambi Beltran, Misha Anissimov, Faith Bernardes, Boy Rupita, Arman Tajanlangit, Edgar Kalinawan, Richard Hearsay, Junjun Paraiso, Homer Medici, Nathaniel Rubio, Kahlil de Pio, Cedric Butron, Ligaya Rabago, Tom Jopson, Anton Java, Roma Oyson, Christian Linaban, Aldrin Sanchez, Raul Luche Jr., Raulito Mendiola, Khriss Bajade, Ada Jimenez, Gerard Miguel Aribe, Gelo Sanjorjo, Vince Rabanes, Josh Salvacion, Frances Villa, Robbi Villa

Four Cebu-based characters’ stories unfold as each one is introduced. Lourd Villegas is a Filipino-American concerned for his parents’ home country’s welfare and future. He schedules several girlfriends, one for each day of the week, but considers getting serious with Angel, a Manileña. Unknown to him, Angel is actually an escort for Congressman Sta. Maria, who’s running on the promise of moral renewal. Angel hangs out with Sta. Maria’s son Mike, who introduces her to various substances, many of which he concocts himself, and provides her with what he calls a Delorean, which makes her transform into a nun named Sister Celeste. Because of her heightened state, Celeste confesses some of her transgressions to Mike, but his father’s more worried because of the discovery of a porn video on the internet that has his son’s name even though he wears a mask. Eden, his partner in the video, attracts Mike, in whom she thinks she might have found a way to evade the scandal that already got her fired from her nurse’s job.

The one time that a Philippine production was described as inspired by Max Ophüls’s La ronde (The Round, 1950, adapted from Alfred Schnitzler’s 1897 play Reigen) was in an annual country report by the late Agustin Sotto for the now-defunct Film International, when he mentioned Ishmael Bernal’s then-banned Manila by Night (1980). The reference was inadequate and inaccurate, since the Bernal film was arguably far more significant and innovative and departed in many ways from a sample that the director never acknowledged, unlike Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975). The millennial regional production of Christian Linaban’s Aberya was in its own turn compared by reviewers to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), premised on its La ronde-like structure of morally compromised characters who pass around heterosexual favors as casually as they consume recreational drug cocktails concocted by Mike, a Congress official’s stoner kid. Once more the comparison is misleading and reflects more on the observers’ inadequate understanding than anything else. As its title suggests, archness is far from any concern of Aberya’s, although irony is arguably an inevitable component of this type of narrative material. The film begins with a citizen who’s several times removed (as a free-floating Philippine-American) from the place for which he professes concern, an urban center distinct form and subservient to the so-called imperial capital of Metro Manila. The characters with whom he interacts,  both women, both bring up the drug dealer who’s also both supplier and indifferent lay, although their sexual carelessness results at one point in a scandal that disrupts the equilibrium that they all take for granted, as fairly comfy middle-class subjects. For all their lighthearted and cynical affect, they’re still unable to resist responding to the slings and arrows that the ideal of financial comfort and emotional maturity launches at them—which is how they find a convergence that they might have hoped for but can’t afford to maintain. In being so low-key in dispensing its perceptivity, Aberya demonstrates how cinematic potential can be more productively realized in setting enough distance from the country’s cultural center.

Superpsychocebu

Language: Cebuano
Year of Release: 2016
Director & Screenwriter: Christian Linaban
(From a story by Christian Linaban & Nicolo Manreal)
Producers: Panumdaman Pictures & &

Cast: John Dino, Wes Bacareza, Christian Saavedra, John Mark Maglana, Rapi Sescon, Angelica Gamolo, Joshua Aquino, Lyka Flare Ruela, Steph Jarina, Zerah Esmero

Tired of the usual safe means of getting high, a man approaches Pancho, an adventurous friend who believes in living outside the norm. Pancho recommends a friend who might be able to tell him how to access a drug called Superpsychocebu, which made everyone who tried it unable to forget the experience. The seeker goes to meet Sexy Samson, who commissions a promo video and tells him to seek out a beach-dweller named Beauregard. The latter takes him on a boat ride and professes the life-changing properties of Superpsychocebu, recommending that he look for Hesus, with an unnamed but unpredictable girl driving him to the forest where he lives. Also calling himself Joshua, Hesus transforms into several personalities before handing the sought-after substance to the seeker, who becomes a famous personality and calls himself Idol.

Viewers who approach Superpsychocebu thinking that it would be more of the director’s previous film, Aberya (Hitch, 2012), might find themselves adrift at several points in the viewing experience, as the lead character turns out to be. Calling it the country’s first stoner film also won’t withstand scrutiny after sufficient acquaintance with Pinas film history, with several titles from the 1970s onward from the likes of Celso Ad. Castillo, Peque Gallaga, Tata Esteban, and even Christian Linaban already laying claim; maybe calling it “the first stoner’s film” might be defensible, if it didn’t sound too nitpicky. All this is by way of cautioning that Superpsychocebu should be approached differently from any of the aforementioned samples, including the foreign models that set the template. For despite its appropriation of the habits and optics associated with drug culture, the film’s social world is incidental, a means for its lead character to journey toward, or actually tunnel into, the pursuit of the ultimate high. Like any kind of commitment, such a goal would inevitably prove frustrating, as psychoanalysts from Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan determined in their studies of desire. Yet the only means that narrative texts can complete their journeys is to pretend that desire is attainable, and to celebrate its acquisition. Superpsychocebu “rewards” its hero, starting with the name he bestows on himself, but it also raises complications attendant to his new-high existence, which points to the question without having to ask it: where will the next high come from? Philippine critics have been trained to downplay such questions as insufficiently philosophical, much less political, but the mere fact that a millennium-era regional film has raised it, suggests that the repudiation itself brings up the essential critical question of who benefits from policing the issues we allow ourselves to confront.

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Tatak ng Kriminal

English Translation: Mark of the Criminal
Year of Release: 1993
Director: Edgardo Vinarao [as Edgardo “Boy” Vinarao]
Screenwriter: Amado Lacuesta
(Based on Pablo S. Gomez’s same-titled komiks material)
Producer: FLT Films International

Cast: Eddie Garcia, Tetchie Agbayani, Johnny Delgado, Jean Saburit, Beth Tamayo, Berting Labra, Fred Moro, Manjo del Mundo, Romy Romulo, Edwin Reyes, Vangie Lablan, Rey Solo, Nonoy de Guzman, Eddie Tuazon, Herminio “Butch” Bautista, Ester Chavez, Jose “Kaka” Balagtas, Ding Concepcion, Tony Tacorda, Boy Sta. Maria, Bebeng Amora, Joe Baltazar, Eddie Samonte, Ben Rivera, Ben Malit, Buddy Salvador, Cesar Villanueva, Johnny Ramirez, Danny Labra, Boy Alano, Tom Calunsod, Freddie Roberto, Jimmy Flores, Robert Roncales, Rudy Vicdel, Tony Concepcion, Mario Cruz, Julito Nunez, Michael Manzano, Jun Tañajura, Rene Tanajura, Allan Ancieto, Ariel Henson, Ramon Fernandez, Marie Barbacui, Panchito

After his release from prison, Gojo confronts his mortal enemy Bito to ask if he might be aware of the whereabouts of his daughter Jessica, who’d be a teenager by this time. Bito’s henchpeople throw him out; afterward, a police officer expels him for vagrancy while he sleeps on a bench at night in the people’s park. He finally wanders into a taxi station, where the drivers befriend him and vow to help him find Jessica. As it turns out, Bito housed Gojo’s wife Laura, after Gojo killed Bito’s brother; Bito beats up Laura everyday and takes an unhealthy interest in Jessica. After casing Bito’s house, Gojo is surprised when Laura emerges and boards his taxi. Laura confesses her regret in shacking up with Bito and tells him she entrusts Jessica to the care of a pragmatic but sympathetic dance instructor.

Close to the same year that Eddie Garcia broke out as renowned action star when his Andres Manambit: Angkan ng Matatapang (Clan of the Brave, dir. Ike Jarlego Jr., 1992) won major prizes at the Metro Manila Film Festival, he featured in a smaller-budgeted but fairly competently made action-spiced family melodrama, where he plays a taxi driver during a period when people in that profession were regularly victimized, sometimes murdered, by holdup individuals or groups, although more prominently publicized were the passengers similarly victimized by gangs using taxis as their snare. The fact that Garcia was already elderly by then—in fact, he would die from an on-set accident while literally performing a millennium-era action role—would befit the postmortem commemoration of his late-era specialization, when he lent his name to the law meant to safeguard the safety of participants in film and TV productions. Tatak ng Kriminal though points to a less-observed problem in Garcia’s generational principles. One could never really automatically fault performers who accede and attempt to excel in roles for which they get hired by producers of all types; but Garcia’s parallel career as director began with Cold War secret-agent films as well as a defense for the convicted rapist of Annabelle Huggins (Ang Manananggol or The Advocate, 1963), culminating in the 1960s with the reelection biopic of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. (Pinagbuklod ng Langit or Bound by Heaven, 1969), before resuming late into the Second Golden Age with left-leaning women-positive material for the major stars of the period, although conflicting at one point with the activist directors guild. His final film performance was in an overt critique of the fascist dictatorship, Benedict Mique’s ML (2018), but one would be hard-put to find a Garcia action-star role remotely similar to what he essayed in TnK. We can argue that his Andres Manambit character, a righteous police officer, set a trend that was difficult for him to buck. Nevertheless he landed the TnK assignment and invested it with the pathos and humor that won him a following among action aficionados, with the character’s underclass identification helping to temper the smugness of his smart-alecky persona. The cab driver’s long-sought reunion with his unsuspecting though endangered daughter, escorted by the golden-hearted feminist madame who protects her (another of the narrative’s casual virtues), occasions a wordless set piece worthy of any of the age’s experts, and affirms Garcia’s mastery of film performance despite the technocratic approach he tended to prefer.

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Pascalina

Year of Release: 2012
Director & Screenwriter: Pam Miras
Producers: Cinema One Originals, Tito & Tita

Cast: Marie Veronica Santiago, Jet Leyco, Anna Vecin, Jessie Silvestre, Randy Punsal, Sanchi Catura, Peewee O’Hara, Cara Eriguel, Alex Medina, Ian Galliguez, Danzen Santos, Marija Vicente, Cora Buenaventura, Rey dela Cruz, Jericho Vega, Jasper Manlangit, Virginia Marcos, Ian Lomongo, Jacyn Esquillon, Ally Lumbera, Teng Cortez, Timmy Harn, Malay Javier, Lili Esquillon, Vicente Diaz, Aila Torre, Kev Abadam, Ei Salcedo, Paolo Domingo, John Arzadon, Divine Aucina, Andrei Lumbera

Pascalina Lagumbay, Lina for short, wakes up on a day packed with a series of unfortunate events. She picks the wrong color for her hair, forgets to shut the faucet, leaves on time for work but has to chase a thief who snatches her bag then cops a feel before he lets go, discovers a new nurse at her workplace station, confronts her boss while red dye streaks her face and uniform—and gets informed that she’s been fired, although her boss pays for the sandwich that she couldn’t buy; her boyfriend Jeff screws her beyond the literal sense, by introducing to her his flirty office coworker who’ll be accompanying him to an out-of-town assignment. She manages to find employment in the same building where Jeff works, but when she meets her sisters for a family get-together, an elderly though unrelated aunt arrives and tells them that their blood relative, to whom she’s devoted, is about to die and needs to pass on her power as an aswang or flesh-devouring monster. No one believes her although Lina, always the pushover, agrees to accompany the lady to visit their sick aunt.

Of the many possibly obscure titles in the canon list, Pascalina will be sure to reward the adventurous viewer setting out to uncover difficult-to-access titles. Its primary distinction lies in purveying an urban-set horror narrative, a rare achievement considering how most successful horror films have to locate themselves in rural wildernesses, the better to distance the viewer from the double wallop of antinatural material packaged in a technologically sophisticated medium: any shred of doubt by the film artists in their material gets automatically aggrandized at the expense of believability in the presentation. Pascalina preempts these pitfalls by bravely harnessing its Third-cinema limitations. As confirmed by the filmmaker (via Facebook Messenger reply on April 23, 2026), it made use of low-end technology during a time when digital production still had to attain its now-standard 4k polish, via the use of the Digital Harinezumi, a plastic toy camera whose manufacturing company halted production a decade ago; the low-resolution imagery might require some playback adjustments—which will nevertheless be entirely worth the trouble. The content is perfectly matched to the technology, with the aswang or flesh-eating candidate introduced as a mousy pushover, bullied by everyone who encounters her, reminiscent of the title character in Aki Kaurismäki’s Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö (The Match Factory Girl, 1990),[1] complete with casually abusive boyfriend. Both dark comedies immerse in developmental detritus and deploy the strategy of enabling identification with central figures disadvantaged by class and gender, so badly treated by people who have to survive by turning a blind eye to any evidence of humanity, that the audience looks forward to their inevitable tipping point. What adds to the movies’s cognitive shock, beyond the negligence visited on it by a critical community confident that it knew better, is the fact that Lina’s pain was also counted as insufficient by political history. A few years after the movie’s release, the larger social horror of murderous extrajudicial violence would descend on a people already stripped of basic decency and barely able to cope with everyday survival.

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Medusae

Year of Release: 2017
Director & Screenwriter: Pam Miras
Producer: Quiapost Productions

Cast: Desiree del Valle, Carl Palaganas, Liz Alindogan, Cris Garrido, Rico Fernandez, Edna Leal, Roberta de Leon, Jocelyn Tan, Rener Concepcion, Ria Miranda, Lee Marvin Torres, Honey Grace Mendoza, Jaime Dominguez, Justin Halili, Nori Ann Napeñas, Ana Velle N. Surreda, Glenda A. Alcala, Jayson A. Leal, Ricky Dator, Elson Leal, Joselyn de Guzman, Leonito A. Orantia, Wilfredo Vilanueva, Onel Matriano, Dante Atimtar, Joselyn Paz, Jimmy Laynes, Reynaldo Map, Rodel Buefano, Junar Luna, Rogelio Kinagpisan, Dionisio Laynes, Mamert Asis, Nono Cabrera, Reynaldo Mapi, Benido Embili, Glicerio Cabrera, Rex Rigodon, Federico Coronel, Romana Verzo, Paterno Calamigan, Tomas Santos, Camille Abigaille Yumang, Ayla de Joya, Gerald Nacua

Since her son Luni had been acting up and was expelled from his school, single mother Alfa takes him to her documentary assignment in a remote fishing village. Luni misses his city friends and easily gets bored by the slow pace of life in the village, so Alfa makes sure to provide him with sufficient sunscreen for his albinic condition and asks him to help her as soundperson during her first interview. Later she quarrels with him when she discovers that he failed to record the answers of the respondent in her first interview. He refuses to accompany her the next day so she locks him in their hut, but when she returns, she finds him gone. A health worker informs her that someone who might be her son arrived with serious jellyfish stings, but when she gets to the clinic, she’s told that he left with another adult. When she checks the closed-circuit recording, she sees Luni leaving with what appears to be her blind twin. She starts worrying about the town’s belief that firstborn children are ritually offered to the sea in exchange for bountiful harvests, but the townspeople tell her to accept her loss just as they accepted theirs in the past.

Medusae encapsulates the predicament of single parenthood, with the further onerosity of a career woman’s situation demonstrated by an initially jarring positioning of extreme samples. In contrast with Alfa, her child Luni is young, male, melanin-deprived, understandably immature; the only definite similarity between them is their fierce intelligence and its resultant stubbornness. Alfa makes an effort to accommodate Luni’s expectations but draws the line in her devotion to her filmmaking career, discovering too late that Luni regards the latter as the equivalent of a rival sibling. She recovers from her anger in scolding him for his negligence in assisting her, but by then his alienation from her (and disappointment in himself) has escalated, and the film, along with her persona, splinters in irrecoverable ways. This schematic description undersells Pam Miras’s confident execution, notably her purveyance of an unsentimental melancholy, appropriate to a recollection of childhood as a domain that can never be revisited once a subject has outgrown it. In the end, the plurality of the titular Medusa extends beyond the motherly options available to Luni; in being as much feminized by his youth and helplessness, and monstrous in the demands he imposes, he becomes as much his mother’s Medusa as her own self-imposed challenge to thrive in the profession that yielded the work that contained their story.

Note

[1] A more contentious point for me is how, despite being an earlier and comparatively impoverished production, Pascalina succeeds in what Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo (2022) aspired to demonstrate, although the latter admittedly had global scope and an overt denunciation of neoliberal exploitation. For a discussion of Nocebo’s depiction of overseas Filipino workers, alongside Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness from the same year, see Joel David, “Chaotic Waters and Well-Tempered Specters: The Philippines as Source of Overseas Labor,” Kritika Kultura 43 (March 2024), pp. 222–249, DOI:10.13185/1656-152x.2084.

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Lola Igna

English Translation: Grandma Igna
Year of Release: 2019
Director: Eduardo W. Roy Jr.
Screenwriters: Eduardo W. Roy Jr. & Margarette Labrador Garcia
Producers: Film Development Council of the Philippines, Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum, EMBA Productions

Cast: Angie Ferro, Yves Flores, Meryll Soriano, Maria Isabel Lopez, Royce Cabrera, Jojo Riguerra, Soliman Cruz, Armando A. Reyes, Peewee O’Hara, Joel Saracho, Rener Concepcion, Conching Ani, Shantel Ruiz Galang, Gemma Amacaha, Sarah Pagcaliwagan, Chamyto Aguedan, Star Orjaliza, Jilla Sara, Sang Pascual, Robert Manalo, Hernand Timoteo Tulud, Rodel Pamarez, Jayson de Guzman Gonzales, Regie Delaluna

With all her contemporaries gone, Ignacia converses with her memory of them, impatient to end her existence and exasperating her daughter Nida. Her small town, where she’s known as Lola Igna, is excited by the news that she might be proclaimed the oldest woman in the world, with Nida claiming exclusive rights to sell merchandise based on this possibility. A small group of followers call for her to awaken from her siesta and greet them, but she hurls a container of her piss at them. Tim, a young teener, walks up to her and introduces himself as the son of her estranged daughter, Ana. He accompanies Lola Igna on her rounds but after she sees an image of her late husband and converses with one of the kids that she delivered as a midwife, who dies soon after, she decides to ask Tim to prepare her coffin. When the result of the oldest-person contest doesn’t favor her, she’s relieved to be rid of the crowd around her house. But then Ana, who broke up with the man who made Tim run away, shows up, heavy with child.

Alter-indie enthusiasts will find a possibly dismaying anomaly in Lola Igna, which may be expected of them but comprises no one’s loss but theirs. The material adheres to old-time realist melodrama, reliant on nonmainstream funding only because it won’t fulfill contemporary expectations of blockbuster cinema. But a closer look will reveal the mechanics of why it succeeds on its own terms. The narrative material is constructed on the persona of Angie Ferro, who was at the age when accomplishing any task or gesture requires considerable patience on the part of any observer. What makes the treat exceptional is that, unlike most serious performers, Ferro never aspired to a level of finesse and dignity. Her delivery was always broad, until straight-talking directors advised her to perform for the intimacy of a camera rather than for the apprehension of an auditorium. She never became defensive about her urinary incontinence, which resulted in a passel of amused anecdotes among her fellow stage performers—in fact, her opening sequence in LI consists of emptying her bladder in a chamber pot that her character maintains throughout the film, for her personal convenience, including as a means of dispersing fans who disrupt her siesta. Most impressively, she foregrounded all the physical vexations of aging, from tooth gaps to osteoporotic posture, and leaned into the now-disciplined theatricality that results in an always-arresting screen presence. Anita Linda, Rustica Carpio, and an aged-for-her-age Nora Aunor demonstrated how worn-out bodies can be bearers of significances that younger performers can only dream of conveying, but Ferro trumped them with a tough honesty and tender humor that did not deny the infirmity of old age but refused to surrender to its mortal implications either. The surest measure of her achievement lies in how the movie’s plot developments no longer have to depend on novelty or unpredictability: whether or not a forthcoming episode can be anticipated, the reward will be contained in Ferro’s response, and she never disappoints in being raw, funny, and ironically suffused with sweet youthfulness.

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The Guys from Paradise

Additional Language: Japanese
Year of Release: 2000
Director: Miike Takashi
Screenwriters: Izō Hashimoto & Itaru Era
(From the novel Tengoku Kara Kita Otoko-tachi by Hayashi Yōji)
Producers: Asahi National Broadcasting Co., Excellent Film, Hammers

Cast: Kikkawa Kōji, Yamazaki Tsutomu, Endō Kenichi, Okina Kaei, Muzahashi Kenji, Kanayama Kazuhiko, Ōtsuka Nene, Oikawa Mai, Monsour del Rosario, Kitami Toshiyuki, Oikawa Mitsuhiro, Sako Hideo, Takenaka Naoto, Pocholo Montes, King Gutierrez, Jess Lapid, Kaye Tuano, Joey Galvez, Levy Ignacio, Oikawa Mai, Kanayama Kazuhiko, Kitami Toshiyuki, Rene Hawkins, Vic Felipe, Lindsay Kennedy, Efren Reyes Jr., Boy Roque, Rey Bejar, Alex Cunanan, Jun Dauz, Alex Braquit, Cris Daluz, Aileen Joy, Sonny Cabalda, Leo Valdez, Philip Supnet, Noe Endaya, Shaina Miguel, Jazi Cruz, Jane Perez, Abby Moscaidon, Bobit Dominguez, Sammy Bernabe, Miyamoto Seiya, Shojima Takeshi, Sako Hideo

Hayasake Kohei, a salaryman of Sanyu Trading, is caught with a kilogram’s worth of heroin and incarcerated in Manila City Jail, where he gets to know a small group of Japanese prisoners. Yoshida, who says he fled Japan after killing some gangsters, hires Kohei to represent him in business transactions, which they accomplish by bribing the guards so they can get around outside. Kohei absconds with Yoshida’s money but when he gets to his hotel, his wife’s no longer in his room. Yoshida finds him and warns him not to trick him again. Kohei realizes his wife and his lawyer are cheating on him so he dismisses them both. He then decides to use the money he left with a Filipino chef who runs a Japanese restaurant, but when the chef discovers what the package contains, he flees with it. Sakamoto, a pedophile inmate drugs Kohei and attempts to sell him to organ harvesters but Yoshida saves him. When a prison riot erupts with the Noypi inmates ganging up on the Japanese, a Philippine prisoner whom Yoshida cheated helps them escape. While driving away, they see a child crying over her injured mother; they take her to her village, where Sakamoto uses his medical knowledge to treat her.

Casual film observers might be delighted to find out that one of Japan’s major film talents elected to adopt the only novel written by one of his compatriots, which happened to be Pinas-set, and devoted his considerable influence to make it happen. Hard-core followers of Miike Takashi, however, might be in for a disappointment, if they hadn’t heard about The Guys from Paradise yet (an unlikely possibility). It has none—actually a few, which might as well be counted as nothing—of the incessant, viscerally horrific, sometimes outright cartoonish violence that made his fan favorites so slavishly venerated: Audition and Dead or Alive (both 1999) and Visitor Q and Ichi the Killer (both 2001), to name just a few. The primary distinction that TGfP shares with the general run of Miike films is the role that irony plays in the narrative; in fact, irony in the film takes precedence over violence, so much so that when violence finally makes its appearance, it still operates on the principle of reversal. These irruptions initially cause perplexity, particularly with Kohei, the lead character, who winds up regarding them as lessons he has to learn in order to survive. The first definitive sign that developments will refuse to follow normal logic is when Kohei witnesses a prison riot: the sounds are recognizable from any other city-jail film, but the participants all seem to be enjoying themselves, delighting in what is after all a departure from the monotony of regimented existence, just as, on a later occasion, a thunderstorm makes everyone rejoice in the rare opportunity to have a clean shower. Yoshida, the gang leader, makes fun of the trans woman whom he regards as maid and mistress, but mourns for the only time in the film when she dies trying to save him. Sakamoto, who was arrested for child rape, cures the mother of a girl who calls for help, and selflessly uses his indispensable medical expertise on her townmates. At the point of no return, when the Japanese prisoners are menacingly surrounded by the rest of the inmates, Brando, the singular Filipino prisoner with an axe to grind against Yoshida, saves them in the surest way possible, by scattering money that the other prisoners hasten to collect. The final narrative irony might be impossible to accept, even if the film already dropped broad hints from the very beginning that Miike would be subsuming his cinematic skills to the source novel’s properties. But a historical parallel, also involving another Japanese novelist, might be instructive:[1] Suehiro Tetchō was befriended by Jose Rizál while the two were traveling by ship to Europe in 1888, and subsequently published Nanyo no Daiharan (Severe Disturbance in the South Seas, Sumyodo, 1891), in which a Rizál-like figure rebels against Spanish occupation in Pinas and is assisted in his aspiration by the Emperor of Japan. Strange though wondrously interventionist, these artists from a northern archipelago; further studies ought to proceed forthwith.

Note

[1] An early source for information on the interaction between the two authors would be Josefa Saniel’s “Jose Rizál and Suehiro Tetchō: Filipino and Japanese Political Novelists,” Asian Studies, volume 2, no. 3 (1964), pp. 353–371. Renewed contemporary interest in these two derived from Benedict Anderson’s final volume Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (Verso Books, 2006, later republished as The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Anti-Colonial Imagination), where he referred to Caroline S. Hau and Shiraishi Takashi’s research, subsequently published as “Daydreaming about Rizal and Tetchō: On Asianism as Network and Fantasy,” Philippine Studies, volume 57, no. 3 (2009), pp. 329–388, DOI:10.13185/2244-1638.1684. I am grateful to Professor Epoy Deyto for providing me with access to The Guys from Paradise, and to Professor Michiyo Yoneno-Reyes for information, unavailable on English-language internet sources, on novelist Hayashi Yōji, whom I initially mistook for Hayashi Jyouji.

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No Other Woman

Year of Release: 2011
Director: Ruel S. Bayani [as Ruel Santos Bayani]
Screenwriters: Kris G. Gazmen & Ricardo Fernando III
(From a story by Keiko Aquino & Ricardo Fernando III)
Producers: ABS-CBN Film Productions, Star Cinema, Viva Films

Cast: Anne Curtis, Derek Ramsay, Cristine Reyes, Tirso Cruz III, Carmi Martin, John Arcilla, Marlann Flores, Ronk Morales, Kitkat, Ricci Chan, Niña Dolino, Kat Alano, Peter Serrano, Fred Payawan, Melvin Lee, Paul Jake Castillo, Malou Crisologo, Johnny Revilla, Matt Evans, Fonz Deza, Via Antonio, Antonette Garcia, Drew Rivera, Veronica Columna, Barbie Salvador, Marnie Lapus, Renan Evangelista, Rodrigo Oliveira, Louie Tan

Ramses Escaler (Ram for short) attends a Zalderiaga company meeting in order to propose that they hire him to furnish their new upscale resort. He discovers that the owner knew his father as a two-timing business partner, and meets the Zalderiaga heiress Kara, who takes an immediate liking to him. Ram entertains Kara to ensure that he can wangle the resort assignment, but warns Kara that he’s married. His wife, Charmaine, is advised by her fiery and combative mother, Babygirl dela Costa, to always be ready to fight for the man she married. When Ram is unable to resist Kara’s charms, Charmaine considers her options. What complicates the triangle is that Kara, who’s determined to use men strictly as playthings, also finds herself falling for Ram.

A sexist politician’s moralistic judgment on lead actor Anne Curtis’s appeal led to feminist pushback from concerned sectors, but perhaps the most nuanced response was the social-network argument forwarded by queer critic and filmmaker Gio Potes in his slide essay “No Other Anne: Some QueerFem Ramblings” (originally posted March 8, 2026, on his Facebook page). Referencing Susan Sontag’s recuperation of camp and Laura Mulvey’s formulation of the male gaze, Potes points out how the contradictions in No Other Woman between wife and other woman emerge “not in spite of the film’s [glossy properties] but precisely through it: the heightened sheen of commercial melodrama makes these tensions even more visible.” Potes’s discussion evokes the transgressive properties of pre-Code romantic comedies in Hollywood, controverting the standard charge by less historically aware critics that the film characters are atypically bourgeois and thereby misrepresent the impoverished majority. Déclassé anxieties permeate the exchanges among the women in NOW, but get weaponized when the wife’s mother (played by Carmi Martin as a witty update of her unapologetic gold-digger in Ishmael Bernal’s Working Girls, 1984), declares that she won’t hesitate to pull out all the stops once she realizes her hubby’s fallen for a rival. The challenge faced in Curtis’s incandescent performance lay in calibrating how much dignity a thoroughly besotted tiger lady should relinquish while still remaining identifiably upper-crust. NOW’s balance between wife and mistress might sound schematic since the former’s comparatively lesser status nevertheless enjoys a moral ascendancy; yet the other woman yields just enough of her self-worth to make everyone around her (and the audience, by extension) wish for an intervention. The dynamic will be recognizable to anyone caught up in passionate power dynamics, regardless of class and even gender. The film assists in further explicating this by rendering the prize, the man caught between competing damsels, incapacitated at one point, though only temporarily and possibly unnecessarily. Scandals besetting our social betters is one of the many pleasures that dramatic art affords, with NOW exemplifying how the privilege of an intimate peek can provide beyond-voyeuristic perceptions.

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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 HBB’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 HBB 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”

Forthcoming.

Forthcoming.

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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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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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