The homegrown filmmakers asserting the gaze of the short medium at QCinema

Shrek Forever After, the fourth installment in the Shrek franchise, was an integral part of Gilb Baldoza’s early encounters with cinema, viewing the film at age 12 in the front row of a local mall theater with guidance from the cinema staff while his mother was window-shopping because she could only afford one ticket. It was a moment of respite for young Gilb, who at the time was enduring his family’s lowest point. “And with my small eyes looking up, Shrek and the cinema itself became so much larger than anything I’ve seen,” recounts Baldoza.

Heightened by a penchant for watching television serials, a small family tradition he carries to this day, it’s the closest he could offer to a kilometer zero as far as his path into cinema is concerned. Fast forward to many years later: Baldoza began making a number of social realist shorts, the most fruitful of which is Kontrolado Ni Girly Ang Buhay N’ya, which won best film in Shanghai Queer Film Festival and best screenplay at Cinemalaya in 2019 and went on to screen in over 20 film festivals.

His latest title, Kinakausap ni Celso ang Diyos, accepted after seven years of submitting his scripts to QCinema, will now debut at QCShorts International. The film, starring artist Bullet Dumas and award-winning indie actor Hazel Orencio, began as two separate, incomplete materials condensed into one—“a story about a person who asks answers from the clouds, and (another about) a man who got his finger chopped off inside a factory.”

“The former,” explains Baldoza, “was inspired (by) my insanity during the pandemic, when I couldn’t enjoy the life I used to live and all I could do was look up to the sky, engorged in its beauty. The latter was based on an accident that happened to my father in the ‘80s, when his left index finger was mangled by a machine in a plastic factory he was working at.”

That Dumas and Orencio, given their background in cinema and theater, would take on the roles of Celso and Tes, respectively, was also beyond Baldoza’s expectations. “I thought it would be a challenge for me as an inexperienced director working with the caliber of their talents on set, but it became the complete opposite because of how leveled and understanding they were conversing with me, discussing their characters, and directing them for the film.

He continues, “On set, along with Joshua (Cabiladas) and Luis (Mateo Abo-Abo), it was like all their energies were the right foundations to build the world of the film I didn’t know we could create.”

In the years between Girly and Celso, Baldoza spent his time producing music videos for artists and commercial ads under Swimming Pictures, an independent collective he put up alongside friends Patch Castañeda and Mal Aranda, while working on a script for his debut feature, the queer dystopian epic Bb. Hindi Mo Inakala, initially titled Ms Gay and the Dying World and selected for a talent development program in Taipei last year—a gestation period that allowed him to sharpen his visual lexicon as a director and storyteller.

Circuitous yet glowing as his previous titles are, Kinakausap ni Celso ang Diyos sees Baldoza trying his hand at filming methods past his artistic tendencies, incorporating static camerawork, heavy visual effects and calmer editing, shooting the film outside of his hometown San Mateo, Rizal, and working with larger professional crew.

But the film in many ways still articulates the spirit of his earlier work—small, passing stories” he loves to watch playing out in real-time. “They are stories of people, names, and events that are so miniscule and unimportant in comparison to the greater narrative of the nation; so small and common that they could happen or would have happened to someone we know from afar, or someone we just passed by. But nevertheless, they are stories of the present,” says the director.

Sam Villa-Real

In her previous short films Noontime Drama, a nominee at the 2021 Gawad Urian, and Hm Hm Mhm, Jury Prize winner at last year’s Cinemalaya, Sam Villa-Real interrogates queer self-discovery in the domestic setting. In her latest short Supermassive Heavenly Body, told through her brand of storytelling, which she describes as “weirdo na may puso,” Villa-Real still leans on that thematic intention, albeit indirectly.

“It roots from my gender dysphoria whenever I gained weight,” says the director. “I identify as non-binary and whenever I gained weight I felt that I looked more feminine, and the curves made me want to hide my body.”

She continues, “There are some details in the film that alludes to it being about this, but since it’s from the POV of a child from the 2010s that has not discovered these things yet, it tackles body image in its entirety rather than gender dysphoria specifically.”

After sharing directing credits with Rotterdam Producers Lab alumna Kim Timan in her past two titles, Supermassive Heavenly Body is Villa-Real’s first foray into solo directing—an opportunity that makes her feel at turns “stoked and terrified.” “I knew it was going to be an uphill battle from the very beginning, and it proved to be true,” she tells me.

Timan now acts as her producer alongside Kesh Diaz. She says both have been there since the inception of the project. “Kim and I were literally having a conversation when I brain-vomited ‘what if batang may black hole sa tiyan’ as a concept. Kim is a talented director in her own right, and I still ask for her advice in pushing the vision one step further.”

Villa-Real also opens up about how the idea for the film, which follows a kid who lives “with a ravenous black hole on her stomach (and) strives to attain the perfect body in time for picture day,” was forged under a fraught juncture in her life.

“I was having a depressive episode late last year and I remember feeling like a dark void was consuming me from the inside out,” she discloses. “I was accustomed to this feeling but I felt that every year, it just got heavier and stronger. At that time, I was reflecting on how, even at a young age, I’ve always just pushed it down, only for it to come back up again.”

She says further, “It made me think of how my body image is directly affected by this void, and every time I gain weight, it’s as if the void grows with me. I wanted to write about that experience and explore the psyche of the hurt inner child that I’ve pushed down so many times.”

So having queer women and people who find a cardinal point in the story she’s telling, as she puts it to me, is “so empowering.” “The fact that nearly everyone in the crew has experienced this, and believed in the material and the vision, is what kept me going despite the tremendous birthing pains I’ve encountered in the making of this film,” she says.

Joseph Dominic Cruz

For over five years, Joseph Dominic Cruz has been submitting his material to the QCShorts screening committee, including six different scripts in the first two years of trying, and has been turned down just as much. “To this day I still wonder if this was all a clerical error on QCinema’s behalf. But maybe that’s just fear talking,” he says.

That dread parallels the feeling that loomed large in his thinking while writing Refrain, his latest short whose genesis he opts to describe to me very vaguely, a context collapse of sorts, but not for a lack of trying.

“When you’re trying to learn screenwriting,” he explains, “one of the earlier things they advise you is to ‘write what you know,’ and while there’s a lot of truth to that, what has worked for me the best has been either to ‘write what fascinates you’ or ‘write what you fear.’ Conceptualizing Refrain would lean towards the latter.”

“Everything that’s in this film,” he continues, “are fears that I’ve had since I was young, while also ideas that I feel like would be with me forever. Often in writing, we chase a feeling, a realization, an opinion, but this one, I feel, is the opposite. It’s running away from something.”

Averse to the filmmaker label, Cruz first nurtured an affinity for the “video” medium through his love for mid-2000s local music videos, the works of the likes of Marie Jamora, R.A. Rivera, and Quark Henares in particular.

“I have fond memories of binging videos such as Astro Cigarette, StrangeBrew episodes, and R.A. Rivera’s Dan Michael Master Magician in my spare time, even recalling years where I had them on loop on my portable player at the cemetery during Undas. To me, those videos were, and still are, to be honest, cinema.”

His older brother, John Arnold Cruz, also a filmmaker, was responsible for this, as well as his first exposure to a local film, Peque Gallaga’s Pinoy Blonde, which they saw together at the cinemas in 2005. “I didn’t quite understand what was going on at the time, but I knew it felt good. There was a certain flavor that the movie had that I couldn’t quite associate with its Western counterparts,” he recounts.

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So began his active admiration for homegrown titles—“magical experiences” as he puts it – such as Henares’ Rakenrol, Jamora’s Ang Nawawala, and Jerrold Tarog’s Senior Year and Sana Dati. “By the time I took in those movies, I was graduating college, which meant I had to choose a career path. And well, I chose what I had to choose. It’s been a rollercoaster since then, to say the least.”

Refrain, which takes inspiration from Sofia Coppola’s “portrayal of loneliness” in Lost in Translation, succeeds Cruz’s 2019 Sinag Maynila entry Hope Spots, alongside his Gawad Alternatibo shorts In Search Of and In Passing, and a personal short docu titled What I Think About When I Think About Wasted Time. And while he thinks that each title is sui generis, he says these films at large gravitate towards his “exploration of memory and hindsight.”

“But in totality,” he shares, “this project is much bigger, in scale and in intention, comparatively to the projects mentioned. For starters, I have grown to be comfortable in making my own short films through my computer and whatever that’s available to grab on the internet. That couldn’t be further from the truth in Refrain.”

Adds the director, “This project would have never gotten off the ground without the efforts of the people who have worked on this project, particularly the producer of the project, Maiqui Tolentino. Refrain is also the first narrative thing that I’ve directed since my days as a student. So to dip back into those waters was terrifying but at the same time humbling and exciting.”

Nicole Rosacay

It took some time for Nicole Rosacay’s drama film Alaga to find a second life at QCinema, after its initial script, submitted to the festival five years ago, failed to make the cut.

The director, who grew up watching rented movies from Video City and editing together short music videos and trailers ripped off from CDs and DVDs via Windows Movie Maker alongside songs pirated from Limewire, originally worked on the material for her college thesis, but that didn’t pan out due to the pandemic and the production work it required. Before landing into film school, though, Rosacay migrated between three different undergraduate programs: communication, literature, and philosophy.

The material’s provenance, according to Rosacay, has also a lot to do with her fondness for David Lynch, hence the insistence on creating a “surrealist environment juxtaposed with real-world aesthetics,” as well as her elation at films that are “emotionally grotesque.”

She tells me, “I’m a sucker for stories that embrace and explore loneliness rather than try to defeat it. There’s a lot that you can do with loneliness and there can be many reasons for it as well. Some beautiful, some ugly. Not necessarily good nor bad.”

“I use the term ‘emotionally grotesque’ because I feel like ‘grotesque’ is often used to describe something visual and tangible, often in a negative way, whereas emotions are abstract and multi-dimensional.”

Prior to this QCinema debut, Rosacay had directed student shorts on a shoestring budget (the same hurdle she encountered while filming Alaga) and later began working for post-production company Narra Studios (a co-producer of the film), which allowed her to build a pool of connections and primed her as a storyteller and, most especially, as sound designer. Under her belt as sound designer are titles like The Gospel of the Beast, starring Jansen Magpusao, cast alongside Madeleine Nicolas in Alaga; A Catholic Schoolgirl; and Ang Duyan ng Magiting.

So it’s no surprise that her instincts as a sound designer factor into the making of the short. “It’s interesting being there from the very first step this time because a lot of images were composed with the sound already in mind or, at the very least, designed to accommodate sound.”

“For Alaga,” she continues, “I wanted first and foremost a physically grotesque setting to be the visual representation of all the things that are not said, showing loneliness and isolation in a very visually maximalist way. I also wanted loneliness to be heard where it’s often thought of as silence.”

“I wanted people to build on these visuals and these sounds and all the empty dialogue to see what the characters’ loneliness, desires, and grief look like, however they think it should look like, whether they think it’s real or not.”

Kukay Bautista Zinampan

Kukay Bautista Zinampan has long mulled over the idea for RAMPAGE! (o ang parada), but it was not until the last three days of QCinema’s call for scripts that they actually began writing what would be their sophomore short, a fitting follow-up to Nang Maglublob Ako sa Isang Mangkok ng Liwanag, which won best foreign short at the 15th Festival For Rainbow in Brazil and screened in several film festivals locally, including Cinema Rehiyon, Binisaya, and Gawad Alternatibo.

Their debut short, about two friends attempting to make sense of their personhood under the threat of a pandemic, starred Serena Magiliw and Jzar Tabilin, their longtime friends who were also cast in RAMPAGE! alongside Vitex Paguirigan and Esteban Mara.

And since much of their work speaks of trans/queer histories and caring systems, Zinampan insists on collaborating with trans/queer talents on and past the screen. “The film set is a playground,” says the director, “a place to toy with the possibilities of making a world. And the most fun ones tend to be composed of a diverse cast and crew. In this case, trans/queer folks from different backgrounds.”

They continue, “There is also an inclination to speak in terms of proximity. These people that I work with are close to me so we understand the material intimately, where it’s coming from and where it’s going. And the only way for us to go is deeper, never astray.”

The completion of RAMPAGE!, described as a heist drama, is not without hiccups. The most towering of which is the lack of deep pockets, which forced the team to crowdfund, especially during post-production. “Although the festival has provided considerable funding, sometimes it is still not adequate and it always feels devastating when money stifles the activity of creation,” admits Zinampan.

This, apart from the director’s cutting anxiety “that the script had not achieved finality.” “This is a shameless feeling of never being fully prepared. In the course of filming, I still felt surges to rewrite but then I thought this anxiety was at the core of filmmaking, of wanting the scenes to turn out as one imagined them, to begin with. In retrospect, this only meant to me as daring to make mistakes.”

“Lastly, we’ve encountered some health concerns that gratefully the production managed well,” they add.

The film was also co-produced by Pothos Collective, which Zinampan co-founded in 2020, beginning with four original members and later seven. “I am fortunate for their gift of friendship and collaboration,” they say of Pothos.

This cohort of filmmakers, as Zinampan puts it, actively “ventures emancipative and novel approaches to filmmaking cultivated by the community’s lived experiences and struggles.”

But while Zinampan plots their cinema under the gnawing realities of queer existence, they refuse to be confined by it. “It’s a contradiction,” they explain. “Center or periphery, inside or outside—I have increasing resistance to speaking in these parlances. When I hear the word queer, I simply have an impulse to enclose it in parentheses or to dispel its notions altogether. People are deeply preoccupied with identity these days and it de-emphasizes the value of work, study, and experimentation.”

“In the end, I don’t want people to support me only because I’m queer or whatever, I want them to believe that I’m arriving at some truth with my work,” asserts Zinampan.

Whammy Alcazaren

“I feel like that meme with the old lady at a rave,” Whammy Alcazaren says of the feeling of premiering another film at this year’s QCinema post the success of Bold Eagle, a trippy, daring film about censorship, despotic regimes, and the internet alter culture, which won the QCShorts best picture two years ago and went on to screen internationally this year, including a Sundance selection.

Admittedly the most experienced of the cohort, the director adds, “It’s exciting to be back and to share the screen with new and unique voices. Trying to keep up with the energy of these young emerging filmmakers is getting me out of breath. But they’re keeping my love of filmmaking alive and kicking. I really do see myself as the oldie in the bunch, drinking iced tea in the corner.”

His new film, a whimsical sci-fi romance titled Water Sports, follows two sad boys, played by Elijah Canlas and John Renz Javier, whose lives are upended by threats of climate change. He describes it as the more accessible sister of his two previous titles, Fisting: Never Tear Us Apart (for which he was censored in 2018) and Bold Eagle, which both entered the Criterion Channel earlier this year through a slate of new independent Philippine cinema programmed by Filipino-American film critic Aaron Hunt.

The inclusion in the US-based streaming service, says Alcazaren, “felt like a dream come true.” But it’s a feeling that “maybe second only to Bold Eagle leaking to porn sites.” “My films,” he continues, “aren’t necessarily catered for SM Cinemas. So having an audience that the Criterion Channel library now allows is a breath of fresh air.”

Water Sports is forged through the work of the director’s father as an environmentalist and urban planner, but “as much as the film is about climate change,” he explains, “I really just wanted to make a film about the power of love.”

He says further, “As a single queer man in his 30s faced with the impending end of the world, Water Sports is a product of the mixed bag of emotions the aforementioned statement brings about. Can I survive the end of the world? Can I do it alone? Will a good backstroke save me in a tsunami?”

The actual production of the film, in a fitting turn of events, has put Alcazaren and his team smack dab in this facet of the narrative. “Sets were being flooded. At times it was too hot to function. It was horrible. Truly a memorable experience for all.”

And much like Fisting and Bold Eagle, the latest short “in form still experiments with the language of the internet, albeit not being shot using a phone.” “The same way it maintains a queer standpoint in being just what it is. It’s queer because it is, because I am, and just because I feel my life and my struggles in the midst of climate change matter as much as anybody else’s.”

Past this, Water Sports acts as the first piece in the puzzle of making Noodles, Our Love was Instant and Forever, Alcazaren’s fourth feature title now under development through the Mylab+ incubator program. “Noodles, Our Love was Instant and Forever is still about queer love under the weight of doom brought upon by climate change. But imagine it with aliens.”

For future projects, though, Alcazaren admits he’ll table his proclivity for filming explicit content via phone for some time to confront the specters of the past. “I’ve been hoping to start work on my documentary rom-com about archiving in the Philippines.”

He continues, “The film I hope to make is much about that—listening to Teddy Co talk about regional cinema, attending screenings in Fully Booked, drinking and talking about films post a film screening in Mogwai. This has been in my mind for the last few years. CinemaOne Originals wasn’t able to pick it up. But I’m really hoping to find someone interested in getting this project off the ground.”

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QCinema runs from November 8-17, 2024. Visit qcinema.ph for the full program.