Fable of the Fish

An ugly ducking attempts to become desirable.

Tour guide Berta is having a tough time making ends meet. She’s forced to let her son Omel travel to the big city to take a job at an electronics store. Luis is studying to be a seaman, but can’t seem to pass his exams. His girlfriend Dolores is working as an intern at a resort, and dreams of going abroad as well. Sandra, following a painful event back in Manila, returns to her native Bohol, taking her spoiled son Eric with her.

The film splits itself between two timelines. In 2006, Ada is basing her thesis on a massacre that occurred twenty years prior in a village called Acacia. Her mother Cecilia was part of a fact-finding mission into a massacre, and Ada’s inquiries bring up her history as a member of the NPA. The other timeline traces the relationship of Ka Felix and Ka Jimmy, two rebels who fall in love, despite the movement’s laws against such a pairing.

Teresa (Rustica Carpio) has worked for the Bautista family since she was seventeen. She was the nanny of siblings Stella, Vince and Andre (Jackie Lou Blanco, Bobby Andrews and Ryan Agoncillo), and their mother. The three have all moved abroad in their adulthood, but all reunite back at home with the passing of their mother. With no one left to stay in the country, it is decided that all of their properties will be sold, including the house they grew up in. But they are faced with the problem of what to do with the elderly Teresa, who has no money saved, and little contact with her relatives.

One morning, residents of a rural village are horrified when the sun rises in the West. According to Islamic belief, this phenomenon signals the Apocalypse. As village folk react differently to the situation, a tragedy strikes when one of the residents is raped and her brother brutally murdered as he tries to avenge her. Steep in superstition, the villagers attribute these to the Devil himself.

A local albino is searching for his identity. Believing that he is the son of an American, he tries to learn English through reading translations and definitions from a Tagalog-English dictionary.

Three siblings Danny, Art and Grace are now well settled with their respective families, in widely contrasting lifestyles. The one common thing that binds them loosely together is the love that their mother Dolores "Loleng" Rosales holds for all of them and her grandchildren, albeit expressed in varying ways and degrees, but always equally nurturing and self-giving. Much as they are held together by her, they are in turn separated by physical distance and the sad legacy left behind by their deceased, erstwhile strong-willed, patriarchal father.

A man follows a woman through the streets.

It is the time of El Niño, a season ruled by superstition and fear. The rain is long in coming, the ground has cracked up dry. The ricestalks are thin and sickly. Villagers go hungry. And a boy dies from a snakebite. The adults splinter. Some pray. Others join a cult to appease earth spirits and wait for the ada, the ricefield spirit goddess of bountiful harvest who dances naked on moonlit nights and signals the need for a virgin’s sacrifice. There are fence sitters, equally pro-church and pro-cult. A landlord’s steward enforces his master’s usury on hapless farmers. A self-righteous priest says rain must first be deserved. Two young women fight for the right to do with their bodies as they please. A bastard boy and a blind girl come of age. Yesterday, they were children.

Powerful but ill-stricken business woman, Vilma Santos navigates her complicated relationship with her caregiver, Angel Locsin and her estranged son, Xian Lim in this story about acceptance, love and forgiveness.

Intoy has had the hots for Doray since they were kids in Kalye Marino, Cavite City, formerly the American Naval Base in Sangley Point. Both marginalized as the long-lasting effect of American abandonment of the said base, Intoy has become Kalye Marino’s best “tahong” caretaker-with-no-angst-about-poverty, while Doray a cheap prostitute-with-no-guilt, tending to her siblings’ needs. Intoy strives to have his own cages of “tahong” so he can have Doray, not for just a night of quickie sex, but forever. But what will he do to when she offers to drop by his hovel-on-stilts to quench his passion, but before it happens Nature has chosen to play a joke on his tahong cage? Will it be goodbye to his tahong business or to his damsel-in-distress and ultimately to Kalye Marino? From Eros S. Atalia’s 2001 Palanca Grand Prize-winning Short Story, Intoy Syokoy ng Kalye Marino is a love tale minus the obligatory romantic sentiments.

Circus hijinks surround the barangay of Sta. Maria in the midst of an international murder sensation. Swanie, Sta. Maria’s barangay chair and a distant relative of the killer, tries to gain political points by staging a wake for the criminal-turned-celebrity. Meanwhile in faraway Manila, Joanna, Swanie’s runaway son, navigates his way through labyrinthine bureaucracy, to give a neighbor a proper burial. With these two unrelated deaths, estranged mother and son each bury the dead long shelved in their hearts. Amidst these unspoken family burials, the neighborhoods’ penchant for funeral fiestas, gossip and secrets, bizarre social events and the sheer mix of scandal and inebriation complete the picture of dying the Pinoy way.

A woman whose whole life is her art, but when she loses it she goes into a self-exile, only to be, hopefully, reinvigorated by a young boy daring to bring it all back.

This is a true-to-life story of Arsenio Cayanan,an Amerasian whose difficulties as a youth led him to a life of crime.

Orphan Carding befriends Army Captain Samuel Corazon, who’s stationed in his town to root out the remaining Huk guerrillas. At the dance hall, Corazon woos dancer Lauriana, and they soon move in together. The two become sort of surrogate parents for the orphan Carding, with Corazon teaching him the ways of men. But the soldier has a dark side, and Carding becomes witness to the violence occurring in their home, and a heinous act committed by the soldier on his common-law wife.

Faced with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody murders and brazen lies, ethically conflicted police lieutenant Hermes Papauran continues his struggle to find a resolution to a 15-year-old case around a volcanic ash-laden landscape and an impenetrable lake.

Father Greg, a diocesan priest, is reassigned to a parish up in the mountains. He embarks on a mission to help solve the crime, a mission which leads him to the discovery of his own personal salvation.

Seven stories with no connection at all but with a common universal theme of doing good deeds and making the right decision.

Tackles the journey of Michelle Orot as a newly hired SPED Teacher and her struggles after knowing that she has seizure disorders - an epilepsy.

Set in the world of high-stakes cockfighting, gamblers place their money and lives on the line.