ALINGASNGAS NG MGA KULIGIG (The Gossips of Cicadae) [2021] | Vahn Leinard Pascual / 15 min
Forced by his father to become the next folk healer of their town, a boy secretly despises his conventional boring life until he falls in love with a
Tikbalang.

CLEANERS 2021 / 78 min
At a catholic high school in the Filipino city of Tuguegarao, a rambunctious batch of students rebel against all expectations to be good and clean: a germaphobe is tested by a bout of uncontrollable diarrhea; a trio of emos are forced to perform tinikling (a traditional Philippine folk dance) with a normie; an uncircumcised boy attempts to ask an ostracized pregnant girl to prom; and the mayor’s son is tempted by his father’s corrupt example while running for youth council chairman. Every frame of filmmaker Glenn Barit’s Cleaners was printed, hand colored with highlighters, and then rescanned, giving each of its angst-drenched emotions a singular handmade texture and the whole film a bone-deep nostalgia for growing up in the Philippines in the early aughts. One-of-a-kind visuals, plus earnest tracks by Filipino emo band Typecast and a swelling score composed by Barit himself, compel us to feel the fullest extent of Cleaners’ all at once loud, soft, funny, and sweet teenage antics and affections.

Paglipas ng Gunaw (When the Apocalypse is Over) : A New Philippine Cinema Explodes on Arrival
Courtesy of KANI RELEASING

These digital, radically color-graded, and often square or even rectangularly framed alternate dimensions offer new ways of seeing Philippine myths, pasts, presents, and futures. The multidisciplinary roots of the foundational First (50s-60s) and Second (70s-80s) golden ages of Philippine
filmmakers—comedians, lawyers, doctors, therapists, pianists, psychic trainers, shamanists—persist today in the graphic designers, animators, colorists, VFX artists, singers, DJs, and event planners who comprise the new voices behind these features and shorts. But the bombastic styles of these active young filmmakers differ dramatically from their classically trained or genre-ingrained progenitors. Without leaving history behind, these films leave stale influences behind, warp them, or flail way off the beaten path. With a form that is heavily motivated by VFX and a concerted focus on post-production (processes in which the directors are often heavily if not solely involved), unlikely aspect ratios, etc. the body of work looks and moves in a way that actually feels new.

Many of these stories imagine absurd, alienating worlds and lonely characters who long for something or someone outside the limits of the frame.