The long-standing conflict between the military forces and the rebel group Abu Sayaff has severely ravaged the poor town of Patikul in Sulu. Residents have become so accustomed to the armed clashes, that reports of kidnappings and recruitment of young Tausugs to join the rebel groups already became normal news to them. However, Amman, a 33 year old coffee farmer in Sitio Kan-Ague, continues to believe that there is still hope for their town. Amman believes that educating his children would change their present situation.
Sarah is a nurse at a Public Maternity Hospital. The hospital is abuzz with pregnant mothers of all shapes and sizes in different stages of labor. The hospital is short on staff on Christmas Day so Sarah is forced to put in a double shift. Sarah observes the women coming and going in her ward, noting who is a first-timer and who is a veteran. Meanwhile, the wards are overcrowded : two women and their babies sharing single beds while those in labor are spilling unto the hallways. Sarah takes these all in stride, her heart and mind laboring over her own personal pains.
A coming of age story about Isabel’s lessons and realizations on life and death as a funeral videography intern. Due to her family situation, Isabel is cynical and skeptical of everything that comes her way. When she enters the I-libings for her required college internship, she sees it as the worst internship her college adviser could suggest to her. Later as she accumulates her required hours, she realizes that the company is not just a place where videographers make money out of other people’s misfortunes but is a place where the dead and the grieving receive special attention. It all comes full circle when Isabel is faced with an unusual family tragedy. Isabel realizes that her internship might have been just 200 hours, but the lessons that the I-libings left her would last a lifetime.
Ang Paglilitis ni Andres Bonifacio is the untold story of the trial of Andres Bonifacio under the Revolutionary Government of Pres. Emilio Aguinaldo. Two leaders, Andres Bonifacio, Supremo of the Katipuneros, and Emilio Aguinaldo, president of the Revolutionary Government, made their way to fight for freedom for the Filipinos against the dominant rule, fought for a cause and for a reason to be one nation. Yet only one should rule. This was the start of Philippine politics. Ang Paglilitis ni Andres Bonifacio is a film documentation of Philippine history put to screen and megged by Mario O’Hara. And now, let the people be the judge whether Andres Bonifacio is guilty or not guilty of treason
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.
Due to a delayed flight, a group of German flight passengers had to wait in the hall of the airport of Manila. The crowd was quite mixed, ranging from a cultivated eastern German teacher couple up to sleazy sex tourists. As the waiting prolonged, more and more aggressions and long-repressed behaviors shed their way to the surface.
It's the story of a young woman, whose husband, is arrested by the soldiers of a Japanese garrison, on the suspicion that he is a guerilla. Dizon pleads her case to the garrison's commander, who sympathizes and lets Yllana go; when the commander's wife dies and leaves their son motherless, Dizon, is hired to feed the baby from her own breast.
The title “Kamera Obskura” is a Filipino spelling of the latin “Camera Obscura” which simply means “dark room”. The film’s concept adheres to formalist cinema, where the filmmaker’s thesis is to make a semblance of a vintage film seemingly produced sometime in the late 1920s to early 1930s in the Philippines. The thesis is to conjure up a film from a period that did not really exist in Philippine cinema’s historical cultural heritage as we know it, such as a pseudo-expressionist / experimental Filipino cinema of the silent film era. It is a film within a film. The narrative plays with the idea of a retro-futurist world where a prisoner locked away in a dark chamber for over two decades only sees the reality of the world outside through the small hole in his cell, which projects an image of the city on his wall, the phenomenon of the “camera obscura”.
Every night, Nana Lusing lies on her bed sleepless because she sees a dark figure looming in her room. Who is this shadow? Is this the devil? Her late husband? A manifestation of her anxieties? Or simply a figment of her imagination?
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.
Two childhood friends who promised to love each other through thick and thin, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer. Something happens to my character Tonton he dies and resurrects just to fulfill the promise he made to Gwen.
Buenos Aires. Exe, 25 years old, has just lost his job and is not looking for another one. His neighbors and friends seem as odd to him as they always do. Online, he meets Alf, a boy from Mozambique who is also bored with his job and who is about to follow Archie, another boy who has run away into the jungle. Through the dense vegetation of the forest, Archie tracks ants back to their nest. One of them wanders off course and comes across Canh, a Filipino, sitting on top of a giant heap of earth and who is about to go back to his strange, beautiful home town, where he too has a miserable job.
An edgy film that tackles anxiety/panic attacks triggered by retrograde amnesia in a person desperately seeking and rebuilding a distorted past . He realizes in the end that his future cannot and must not be defined solely by his past. His present is as relevant as his past to his future.
A family is in ruins after the last male member dies. To salvage their future, the matriarch Kadiguia decides to look for a suitable husband for the eligible Tonina to continue the line of martyrs and warriors. Many miles away in the city, Aida secretly works in a hotel after falling victim to an illegal recruiter. She hides this fact from her family who believes that she is in faraway Kuwait working as a nanny.
A promising young politician who’s running for the senate. He then meets a female spin doctor who helps in orchestrating his campaign and giving him a new image. The first choice to play his leading lady is Jennylyn Mercado, since they’ve already proven that they have good chemistry together.
Femme fatale causing death to anyone she ever crossed paths with.
An unlikely love story between polar opposites Uno and CJ two strangers, and how one night changes their lives forever. Unforeseen circumstances collide and force Uno and CJ to live under the same roof as they both deal with their sense of responsibility and their yearning for security. Uno is motivated by his sense of family while CJ is governed by an unconditional love that should put her first above everything else. The unlikely thing that binds Uno and CJ together paves the way for them to find in each other the kind of love they never thought they needed.
Typhoon survivors fall victim to syndicate that forces the to beg on the streets.
After finishing prison sentence in Canada and came back to the Philippines, Gemma wants to recover her son after she was abandoned by her husband, Edwin. To do so, she worked as a nanny and was hired by Cindy, new wife of her husband. Being closer to her son in this household, she plans to escape with her son.