The bizarre history of Filipino B-films, as told through filmmaker Andrew Leavold's personal quest to find the truth behind its midget James Bond superstar Weng Weng.
This film is a record of the first Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. It reflects the various ways the festival was given shape by nascent global changes embodied by Perestroika, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and many other contemporaneous events.
Nicolas Deocampo--a prominent Filipino filmmaker, academic, historian and activist--goes down memory lane in this intimate vignette and paints through his piercing poetry and gripping visual images—the wins of the LGBTQIA movement as he retells his own struggle in finding love and belonging.
A comprehensive history of early cinema in the Philippines. Told in narration over 3D animation.
A candid story about a Filipino transvestite who works in Japan’s entertainment center in order to support his family. In the daytime, Joan attends to his daily training to prepare him for work as entertainer in Japan. At night, he works as one of the female impersonators in Manila’s gay bars. All these to feed a family of eighteen. Although it will be Joan’s fourth trip to Japan, he still finds it hard to make as much money to make their lives better. Meeting other gay entertainers in the bar where he works, they talk about the difficulties Filipino entertainers experience while working in Japan. The situation is no different though from the life lived by someone like Joan in the Philippines who was once caught in a drug bust operation and sent to jail. Threats and difficulties seem to hound these sex warriors wherever they go.
Based on Nick Deocampo's award-winning book, Cine: Spanish Influences on Early Cinema in the Philippines, this digital documentary traces the beginning of cinema in the Philippines in 1897 when two Spaniards showed the first moving pictures in Escolta. Against the backdrop of war and revolution, film developed to become the emerging Filipinos' dominant form of public entertainment. The documentary further explores the elements of Spanish culture found in Filipino films as evidenced through the classic films made by three National Artists - Eddie Romero, Lino Brocka, and Ishmael Bernal. This is Deocampo's homage both to Philippine cinema and the Filipino nation that is its twin.
Film: American Beginnings of Philippine Cinema is the second episode in Deocampo's evolving saga of the country's history of Philippine cinema. Based on his recent book, Film: American Influences on Philippine Cinema, this 3D-animated documentary ventures from Escolta through Avenida as we discover how film came to be in the Philippines.
