The New Faces of Dreams and Mysteries

The amazing adventures of Gunam-gunam (Rumi) and Guni-guni (Phantasm). Adapted from the book Auxiliary Materials for Teaching the Filipino Language by Kelly Sta. Ana Nicolas (Philippine Normal College, 1964).

It’s December 2020, more than nine months of community quarantine in the Philippines. The idea of nothingness is actual and symbolic. With imposed restrictions in the physical world, how can we tell our personal and collective stories of living under the “longest COVID-19 lockdown in the world”? Confined at home, physical and non-physical boundaries are magnified as the filmmaker attempts to articulate existence through floating in time and space.

A woman with falling hair, anxious about her online work, a child unable to leave her room in a power outage, and a yoga buff with body issues, all encounter an unseen terror while alone in their urban middle-class homes during the nationwide quarantine.

A filmmaker’s reflection about his life during the pandemic, as "the flames are climbing up the wall."

A Manobo tribe flees from fear only to find themselves in another dreadful situation: a lockdown due to the pandemic.

The night before the lockdown, while reviewing some unused footages from my latest film project (Hinulid), a small box from an anonymous sender arrives. The box contains a Bikol translation of the Tagalog long poem, Ibong Adarna, and an egg.

In transit, Carlo reminisces the blissful memories of his beloved mother, Joy, who died a few months ago while the country was in lockdown facing a worldwide pandemic. As he returns to his hometown Pampanga to reunite with his family, he will be facing a first birthday without his mother.

In times of necessary physical distancing, ten couples from the filmmaker’s hometown allow the cameras into their homes not to disturb but capture any delicate exchange.

As the global pandemic affects more than half the world, the Family Chan tries to cope with the seemingly permanent quarantine and the claustrophobic circumstance of being together.

Filming in a Time of Uncertainty is a short documentary film that follows a small team of filmmakers, who are based in the region in Mindanao, as they struggle to shoot a film amidst the trying times of the pandemic. And how they were able to comply with the community's minimum health guidelines, while observing the basic health care, in spite of the intricacies of the film industry’s standard health protocols.

A tribute to the people that we fear to lose, and for the ones that we have lost. It is a story about the fear that we have to face as the new normal.

In a period beset by a plague, the visionary’s portal to his soul has been thwarted by the four corners of his abode. With imagination as the only detour, the drifting of thoughts is inevitable. Amidst the overcast, the curtain opens to the apparent truth – truth that no frame can impede a visionary.

A young entrepreneur meets a group of coffee farmers and finds the inspiration to continue despite the pandemic.

A radio astronomer receives the first extraterrestrial radio signal ever picked up on Earth. As the world powers scramble to decipher the message and decide upon a course of action, she must make some difficult decisions between her beliefs, the truth, and reality.

A death row inmate turns for spiritual guidance to a local nun in the days leading up to his scheduled execution for the murders of a young couple.

Photographer Robert Kincaid wanders into the life of housewife Francesca Johnson for four days in the 1960s.

This expansive Greek drama follows a troupe of theater actors as they perform around their country during World War II. While the production that they put on is entitled "Golfo the Shepherdess," the thespians end up echoing scenes from classic Greek tales in their own lives, as Elektra plots revenge on her mother for the death of her father, and seeks help from her brother, Orestes, a young anti-fascist rebel.

Michel takes up pickpocketing on a lark and is arrested soon after. His mother dies shortly after his release, and despite the objections of his only friend, Jacques, and his mother's neighbor Jeanne, Michel teams up with a couple of petty thieves in order to improve his craft. With a police inspector keeping an eye on him, Michel also tries to get a straight job, but the temptation to steal is hard to resist.

Many loosely connected characters cross paths in this film, based on the stories of Raymond Carver. Waitress Doreen Piggot accidentally runs into a boy with her car. Soon after walking away, the child lapses into a coma. While at the hospital, the boy's grandfather tells his son, Howard, about his past affairs. Meanwhile, a baker starts harassing the family when they fail to pick up the boy's birthday cake.