Nitrate: To the Ghosts of the 75 Lost Philippine Silent Films (1912-1933)

A black comedy film, which focuses on two film workers, Raffy, the clapper, and Dido, a utility boy. Both share the same dream: to direct their own films someday. Their lives as mere "small production people" took a different turn when, together with the people in the unit van they were riding,had an encounter with armed men. Their co-workers were killed, and the two of them were forced to drive the unit van out of fear until it ran out of gas. The van contains equipment for movie production like cameras, lights and film stocks. They ended up in a secluded barrio not yet reached by modern technology, and therefore, the townsfolk knew nothing of the movie industry.

Kulob is everyone who believes in nothing

EDSA XXX takes us on a wild ride through the ups and downs, twists and turns in the life of one man’s downfall and the rise to fame of another. The present leader KULOG NEGRO has led the country to progress; his rallying call is championing poverty for the benefit of tourists and film festivals. But the well-meaning leader is a mere puppet in the political arena and someone has just decided that he has to go.

The start of the film sets the tone. A tortured man looks as if he will castrate himself. Later he staggers aimlessly and bleeding heavily through the streets of a town that is just waking up. In parallel, the film shows the marital discussions of a couple, with the husband hiding behind the camera.

What follows is a black-and-white silent film set in the 1890s during the brewing Filipino revolution against Spanish colonialism. A series of tragic and comic sequences tells the Three Ages of an Indio (“common man”) as he progresses from boy bell ringer in a village church to teenage revolutionary to adult theater actor rehearsing a popular Spanish play.

A bunch of 10-year-old kids rob pedestrians and kill without a mercy. But after a failed bank robbery, the dangerous game comes to an end with twenty years of imprisonment. After two decades, they are released but soon begin to disappear one by one.

Somewhere in Manila, a crime boss rules with an iron fist. To his most loyal henchman he gives the task of guarding his woman. Before long, she falls in love with the henchman, and the star-crossed lovers decide to leave town. Fighting ensues. It is while on the run that they finally get to know each other for the first time.

Mondomanila tells the story of teenage anti-hero Tony de Guzman and the rough neighborhood he calls home.

Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.

Documentary profiling the directors involved in the loose Philippine New Wave filmmaking movement.

Girls are hidden in a dark room.

“Double, double, toil and trouble,” indeed! Shakespeare’s punchiest tragedy gets a makeover in a way that only the prodigious Filipino multi-hyphenate Khavn De La Cruz could deliver. Unfolding in the Municipality of Marcos, Ilocos Norte and Khavn’s own Burroughsian Interzone of Mondomanila – also the title of the director’s crazed horror-comedy-crime drama, which premiered at IFFR 2012 – this mash-up of styles, genres, moods and atmospheres features a cast of over 100 performers and defies any easy description, even with so familiar a text. But as Khavn says of his source material, "Usually, word is king. Here, text is just one of the many cogs. It’s a column, a roof shingle, an ornament."

A touching ode to Leonardo de la Cruz, the filmmaker's late father, who died earlier this year of lung cancer at the age of 65, the film is a personal meditation of sorts. It is at once dark, yet not unrelieved by poetry on the mysteries of life, existence and mortality.

A merman is washed not ashore but into the heart of a bustling metro. Disoriented, he walks around and runs into several characters, all of them in the middle of their nightly grind.

In this whimsical historical fresco, a counterpoint to today’s urgent political issues, the figure of the Filipino revolutionary Rizal is revisited in the light of early silent films.

"The Twelve" is a pre-apocalyptic vision reminiscent in theme to Hal Hartley's 2000 As Seen By film "The Book Of Life". This feature-length genre-bending digital work features scenes of "The Apostles" drinking the night away while waiting for the Second Coming of Christ, interpolated with musical vignettes that evoke but take further the shattered narrative of "Breaking The Waves". "The Twelve" is a deceptive postmodern work that explored themes of faith, redemption, and contemporary values, and balances satire, science fiction, and social critique.