A. Hunt: Regulated Filmmakers, Deregulated Film Industry: Some Problems in the Philippine Film Industry and their Solution

An essay about the 2024 QCinema International Film Festival, which once again coincided with nearby housing demolitions, the film industry’s growing dependence on international co-productions, screenings of censored films, Hollywood dominance of distribution, and contradictions of the industry as talked through with local film workers and organizers.

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QCinema International Film Festival

After arriving in the Philippines last November to serve on the jury of QCinema International Film Festival, I learned about a series of housing demolitions in Sitio San Roque¹ that have coincided with the festival every year for at least the past six years (2018–2024).²
Since 2010, the National Housing Authority and Quezon City Local Government Unit have partnered with private developer Ayala Land to destroy this longstanding urban poor community to make way for Vertis North, a “mixed-use” estate featuring luxury malls, hotels, and a resort-casino. In 2013, the first edition of QCinema took place in the first Ayala shopping mall in the area. These public-private partnerships stem from Executive Order 620-A, which authorized in 2007 the construction of the Quezon City Central Business District (QCBD), to make northern Metro Manila “globally competitive”³ and “the center of gravity of all commercial activities.” In other words, it is another World Bank economic policy for big bureaucrats and big landlords to deepen and diversify the country’s stifling dependence on foreign capital and junk imports. As the Philippines literally buys the US’s trash, foreign corporations extract the country’s largess of raw materials and export it to imperialist nations for cheap. The US maintains access to 9 military bases (and more yet, unofficially) to hoard sites of resource extraction, violently repress and surveil the countryside, and provoke war with China. In short, the semi-feudal semi-colony has been elaborately set up to produce super-profits for its prior occupier and current exploiters at a constant and growing expense to itself.
Philippine film production is also increasingly dependent on, and influenced by, outside “support.” Since COVID-19, the industry has leaned more heavily on international co-productions with Southeast Asian, East Asian, and Western countries, while its titles continue to be priced out of their own cineplexes by Hollywood movies. All but a handful of Philippine theaters today reside inside of mega malls owned by the country’s wealthiest clans: the Ayalas, the Sys, the Zobels, etc.—age-old sellouts. One of the only showcases for “independent” (let alone any) Philippine cinema, QCinema International Film Festival, was a creation of the Quezon City Film Development Foundation and then actor-mayor Herbert Bautista. It has always necessarily aligned with the broader objective to prime the city for foreign investment and dig the dirty syringe of private enterprise deeper into the city’s critical public endeavors. Today, QCinema is the premier funder and exhibitor of what is popularly considered the nation’s “independent cinema,” or cinema dependent on private wealth and a handful of increasingly privatized public film institutions rather than the major studios—though both sources generally stem from the same comprador ruling class and foreign capital. These include, on occasion, genuinely progressive and militant films like 2024’s Rampage (O Ang Parada), Objects do not Randomly Fall From the Sky, and Invisible Labor, or many works by Kiri and Sari Dalena⁴ in other years, despite ongoing red-tagging and vicious counterinsurgency. The festival is a key facilitator and symbol of the further liberalization and globalization of the Philippine film industry, as an extension of that of the city and the country at large.
As more land and property are privatized through public-private means for local and foreign elites, urban poor—often already “internally displaced” from the countryside due to state violence, US war games, and increasingly severe economic precarity due to the worsening crisis of neoliberalism—have fewer options. Internal refugees in the Philippines bear the sharpest edge of the primary contradiction between imperialism and self-determination. They are displaced internally by new development projects of the native elite, whose express purpose is to service one foreign power or another. And if they are finally pushed out of their country to an imperialist nation, they become part of the deeply exploited migrant labor that is integral to the perseverance of that imperialist nation.
Encountering these blatant contradictions as one of QCinema’s foreign guests, representing their growing reach and reliance, pushed me to scrutinize the film industry I had merely planned to visit. On my three-month trip, I also witnessed the screenings of two previously censored films and the infiltration of the Metro Manila Film Festival—known for showing exclusively Philippine cinema in theaters nationwide for the only time out of the year—by Hollywood studios. Deeply informing and influencing my understanding of these industry shifts are the refreshing and lucid essays of film critic and professor Epoy Deyto, whose article, “Double Feature: QCinema and Sitio San Roque,” exposed me to the demolitions that recur during QCinema. He is a frequent collaborator and protege of filmmaker and film historian Nick Deocampo, whose materialist film history is essential to understanding the roots of US imperialism in the Philippine film industry and how they have evolved today. My understanding is filled out by interviews with Deyto, Mayday Multimedia Executive Director Brian Sulcipan, and Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP) Chairman Joey Reyes.
On November 8, 2024, the opening day of QCinema, the Quezon City government oversaw the demolition of around 300 family homes,⁵ not in Sitio San Roque as expected, but in the barangay⁶ Bagong Lipunan ng Crame (“New Society” of Crame). The city provided no relocation plan for the hundreds of families it displaced. Just hours after canopies displaying her name for politicians to oversee the evictions from the shade were pitched at the demolition site, Quezon City Mayor Joy Belmonte opened QCinema with a disclaimer: her speech would be short this year, only introducing festival partners, sponsors, and subsequent speakers. Perhaps she had come from a long day’s work.
As Deyto reminds us in the aforementioned essay,⁷ psyops “do not always need to be deliberate cover-ups or distractions.” Surplus cultural state apparatuses of comprador ruling class dictatorships always primarily serve imperialist and comprador interests, which include, consciously or not, the spectacle of ostensibly “independent” and free creative expression for the minority middle stratums, distracting from the everyday economic and military violence committed against the overwhelming majority of the population.
The Executive Director of the Quezon City Film Commission (QCFC), Liza Diño-Seguerra, followed Belmonte, affirming the government film agency’s

commitment to expanding QCinema beyond our local cinephiles and creating a vibrant hub for the global film industry…. We launched the QCinema project market, a fantastic platform for co-production and investment tailored to Filipino and SEA filmmakers…. We saw a significant increase in our international attendance which only fuels our passion to keep this momentum going.⁸

She went on to highlight, exhaustively, the 21 Filipino co-produced titles in that year’s program (Viet and Nam, Don’t Cry Butterfly, etc.), a forum for discussing “how filmmakers are merging the narrative depth of arthouse cinema with engaging structures of genre storytelling, reaching new audiences and creating films that resonate across cultural and linguistic divides” (hinting at the ways international co-productions have influenced the form and content of Philippine films to be less locally specific and more broadly appealing—often leading to a reliance on remixed genre tropes spruced up with self-orientalizing local detail). Finally, she declared the city’s bid to become a UNESCO Creative City of Film, a certification that would prop a door to an allotment of the national budget and more international funding. In keeping with the theme, Directors’ Factory Philippines, four short films produced locally in Dapitan but under the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight initiative’s French mentorship, opened the occasion. Neoliberalization in the name of international cooperation and ASEAN (the Southeast Asian capitalist bloc) solidarity would remain the overriding message of the festival. While the city covered the flights and lodging of festival guests like myself from around the globe, residents of Bagong Lipunan ng Crame were suddenly fending for new homes and livelihoods just a 20-minute walk away.
From this violence against the poor comes the ruling class surplus, from which a meager portion is drawn to distribute conditional resources to petty-bourgeois artists. As the film industry opens itself wider to exploitation by the world capitalist system, the already limited creative freedom of filmmakers becomes further entangled in the interests of their diversifying patrons. Many co-productions come with crew quotas, whereby the local production must hire key creative roles (producers, cinematographers, editors, etc.) from the investing countries. Throughout QCinema, filmmakers bemoaned these quotas. At best, they lead to infrastructure that might be reappropriated when the masses seize state power or relatively innocuous, fruitful cultural exchanges. At worst, they lead to the consolidation of cultural production between reactionary ruling classes and creative and practical divisions and compromises. A friend at the festival griped to me about a post-production sound crew in Taiwan who struggled to reproduce the distinct soundscape of a film set in Quiapo, a historic district in Manila—whereas the right local hire would have been more familiar and intuitive with its aural patterns and locally known signifiers.
The co-produced film must also, in one way or another, broaden its purview to the broadest audience of the partner countries and the world’s largest markets; ideally, it is “universal” enough to appeal to an imagined global audience with increasingly homogenous taste and expectations. In withholding so much political and cultural depth and specificity, producers and distributors weaken viewing appetites on a mass scale. This broadening of form and content does not always occur in the obvious manner of, say, a western creative producer forcing changes to casting or a script, though I heard many such overt cases in passing and in panels at QCinema. In the “Case Studies on Co-Production: Cannes Directors’ Factory” panel,⁹ on the short films that opened the festival, producers and “Factory” mentors admitted to telling the co-directors of Silig that the first script they submitted “didn’t sound like them” before asking them to draft a new script from scratch. In another instance, the local producers of the Factory pushed the Walay Balay filmmakers to cast one of their go-to fair-skinned celebrity actresses, Shaina Magdayao, in a film about the siege on Marawi by the US-backed AFP [Armed Forces of the Philippines], which decimated the Muslim capital and displaced over 100,000 indigenous Maranao, many of whom remain internally displaced to this day. This casting imposition whitewashes the tragedy while new tourist and military sites continue to supplant the ruins that once held decades of Moro history and culture.
At the same time, it is not inconceivable that Silig’s co-directors could have written an initial script that did not in fact sound like themselves to appeal to what they assumed the Factory wanted. Neither is it inconceivable that the co-directors of Walay Balay might not have challenged their producers’ lazy casting suggestion in fear of losing the opportunity, or future opportunities, with internationally powerful industry players.
Critic and filmmaker Epoy Deyto explained,

[Creative producers] tweak your material. Or rather, since it should be an act of self-regulation, you tweak your material on your own accord, believing that it is you—to get that grant.¹⁰

I talked with a local screenwriter who told me:

We [a film studio attached to a large Philippine production] were targeting the Chinese market at the time. We were watching how Hollywood responds to the Chinese market. The conservative number for a Chinese theatrical run is USD 1 million USD in a week. The studio creative head said that Hollywood has been removing some of the religious and nationalistic material from their IPs because it needs to be generic enough to be fed to the Chinese market.¹¹

Between 2014 and 2024,¹² the US’s share of the global box office nosedived from 85.6% to 69.5%, while China’s tripled from 5.5% to 16.5%.¹³ Less developed industries like the Philippines are affected by and necessarily tail the trends of the global market. The screenwriter explained,

There are very few incentives to buy Filipino material right now. I think that’s also one of the difficulties of our project. We tried to make it as generic as possible, and it’s still failing. Maybe my impulse in the beginning was correct—we should have made it as Filipino as possible. There are a lot of ideas that were just removed because the creative head said the Americans would not get that reference!¹⁴

More recently, however, Hollywood seems to be pivoting slightly from dominating Philippine cinemas with just Hollywood movies to controlling Philippine film production and owning distribution rights for a cut of their box office and screening fees. This could be Hollywood acknowledging the Philippine audience’s growing desire for a sovereign, national cinema as well as its relative decline as the unmatched producer of technically superior film commodities. Regardless, their purpose is to own and control more of the local industry and increase profits.
This struggle of Filipino filmmakers to genuinely express themselves through the country’s means of film production and distribution reflects the broader struggle of the Philippines for national sovereignty and genuine democracy.
“At least in the Philippines we don’t have the illusion that we’re independent,” Deyto said. “Maybe some filmmakers are deluded that they’re independent, but generally we are not.” I had asked him how film workers in the Philippines reckon with the contradictions of their labor, primarily rooted in US imperialism. Most QCinema attendees I met openly discussed them; Visayan¹⁵ writer and filmmaker Ligaya Villablanca, for instance, wrote an essay for the festival’s Critic’s Lab about the concurrent housing demolitions, their resentment of the Manila-centric film industry, and yearning for their film community back home in Leyte.¹⁶ The festival selected them for the Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc Award for Film Criticism.
While I have struggled on a less than minimum wage income (around 25K USD compared to 34K USD) on New York living expenses, most of the film workers I met in the Philippines in similar and higher positions, made in the range of only 3–4K USD a year.¹⁷ Depending on the region, minimum wage in the Philippines ranges from Php 316.00–Php 645.00 (5.52 USD–11.27 USD) a day, with many agricultural workers in the countryside receiving far less. In the 2020 short documentary Pagkatapos ng Tigkiriwi (After the Dead Season),¹⁸ farmers reported monthly wages of Php 3000–4000 (54.00 USD–72.00 USD a month), or around 648 USD–864 USD a year, not accounting for steep loss and expense from the dead season, which can last up to half of the year. These conditions, in addition to constant sham development, bombings, and surveillance, push agricultural workers to the city (to neighborhoods like Sitio San Roque), where they are subject to displacement again.
For these reasons, over 7,000 Filipinos leave the Philippines to seek higher-paying work every day, often only to accrue new layers of exploitation and state repression abroad. Most of the Filipino migrant workers I know were swindled by their recruitment agency (charged ludicrous fees their families often need to collectively take loans out for) and misled into thinking a visa and a job suiting their work experience awaited them upon arrival. The reality was instead that their employers harbored them in a cycle of debt, wage theft, 24-hour work days, and threats against their vulnerable status to continue working in deeply exploited and inhumane conditions. The constant threat of ICE detention, whose torture and medical neglect push many migrant workers to “self-deport” back to the Philippines,¹⁹ makes them perpetually suspended between nations in a state of utmost precarity—often forcing them to organize.
In the Philippines, I met many film workers who planned to move to the US or South Korea because of the increasingly untenable contract wages. More and more, the Philippine petit bourgeoisie is unable to secure property or means of production and is descending the class triangle into the proletariat (the national bourgeoise is also down-sliding into the petit bourgeoise). Should they choose to brave what options they have back home, they’ll have to depend on the financial support and resources of institutions tied to the systems that oppress them.

So we have no choice but to be complicit [in state violence]. We can’t get out of that. I never actively campaigned for a boycott during QCinema [due to the parallel demolitions], because a lot of friends are also involved. But it’s more a matter of remembering. Have it in your memory that you are participating in something horrendous, or more horrendous than it appears to be…. It’s always these complications between your constitution and the general history of class violence that we have.²⁰

Deyto named several major art galleries, including Silverlens²¹ and Ayala Gallery, as those “owned by landowning people with a history of shooting peasants.” To supplement QCinema’s production grants for shorts—as a higher and higher budget is required for “independent” short film production to compete in the global market—many filmmakers seek additional funding from private art institutions like Tarzeer Pictures (also a gallery space), only to find that they are also connected to big comprador capitalists like Enrique Razon, who built the aforementioned resort-casino on top of Sitio San Roque and is leading a hydro-power dam project that will leave around 12,000 people in Laguna province²² without land or means to make a living.

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While Deyto felt there are lines that artists in the Philippines should not cross, he did not call for moral purity or total abstention. After all, the iconic filmmaker Lino Brocka was, he said, “one of the biggest guys around” but also one of “the biggest organizers of artists. I think he’s unmatched. And I think that kind of strategic position played well.” In addition to critiquing the Marcos Sr. regime in his films, Brocka founded and was the chairperson of Concerned Artists of the Philippines [CAP], a broad progressive organization for artists and cultural workers which persists today. CAP chapters have even launched overseas and in the US, in cities like Portland and, most recently, New York City. In the 1987 documentary profile Signed: Lino Brocka, the director famously says to camera,

I think the Filipinos were too kind, you know. I think we were too lax on them. They should have been killed, as far as I’m concerned. My answer to that question about Imelda and [Ferdinand] Marcos before was always no tears for them. Absolutely no tears. I think they should have been killed. As far as killing them is concerned, I would volunteer to be in the firing squad. I would want to be in the firing squad. And as a matter of fact, I don’t know how to fire a gun. But for them, I think I will train.

Deyto also pointed to Kiri Dalena’s The Guerilla Is a Poet (2013) as an important film reared from contradiction but honed into a lasting tool for the national liberation struggle. He didn’t condemn it, because otherwise the film, and its expressive utility, would not exist. Poet is a documentary-narrative feature about the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the New People’s Army (NPA). The film takes the perspective of the armed national liberation struggle (the longest in history and ongoing), yet was funded by CineFilipino, under the MVP group of companies owned by Manuel V. Pangilinan, one of the ten wealthiest people in the Philippines. He is the Chair of Philex Mining Corporation, whose operations have led to tailing spills, deforestation, and deaths of workers. As a poisoner of the land and people, its facilities have been directly targeted by the New People’s Army.²³
I asked Deyto if there was ever a campaign to boycott a cultural institution in the Philippines by any national democratic mass organizations, or the multi-sectoral orgs that make up the fight for genuine democracy in the Philippines. Off the top of his head, he couldn’t think of any. The call from Filmworkers for Palestine to boycott Berlinale²⁴ did not seem to translate to the Philippines (see Antoinette Jadaone’s Sunshine and other Philippine titles). But a few months later, there were pervasive, organized calls by Philippine presses and literary organizations to boycott the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany for its financial ties to Israeli tech, surveillance, and defense systems. The same call was re-organized and made this year. And this October, Kiri Dalena called out Tarzeer’s ties to Enrique Razon, pushing people to reconsider their grant applications (see footnote 2).
Responding to Dalena’s post, Manila-based poet Angelo V. Suarez wrote on Facebook:

More and more galleries and art platforms are being unmasked—not just for catering to the needs of landgrabbers and rights violators for luxury collectibles, but for being owned, run, and impresario’d by landgrabbers and rights violators themselves. Hopefully more and more artists recognize how small the emancipatory potential of artmaking is, and how huge the stakes are for participating in the wider struggle for national democracy and socialism. Organized within this framework, artmaking can multiply and make effective any emancipatory potential.²⁵

All but one or two US filmmakers, despite their relative comfort and safety nets for risk, have chosen not to withdraw from film institutions complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, or (more importantly) have yet to seek political organizations and integrate and struggle with the exploited majority, though many have re-appropriated their platforms to propagate pro-Palestine stances and/or joined cultural groups like Filmworkers for Palestine, which has the broad based support to apply popular pressure on complicit companies like MUBI²⁶ (from whose publication, Notebook, this very article was withdrawn).
But as mentioned, elite film institutions can contain a positive aspect in spite of themselves, occasionally producing progressive discussion and work that culturally and/or materially support national liberation struggles. The Razon-linked Tarzeer Pictures has financed films like Maria Estela Paiso’s Objects do not Randomly Fall from the Sky, which has since been used as a high-production value propaganda and educational tool by national democratic mass organizations and as a means of fundraising for the fisherfolk in the film, who viscerally endure the consequences of inter-imperialist contradictions between the US and China.²⁷ But, as the poet Suarez²⁸ warned, “the emancipatory potential of artmaking” in the mainstream, “the independent,”²⁹ and the avant-garde was frail to begin with and wilts every day. As contradictions heighten and conditions worsen, arts institutions become not only harder to game for resources but more violently antagonistic (through censorship and surveillance) toward the oppressed masses and the cultural workers whose labor they rely on.

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When I asked Deyto about the tactic of cultural boycott in the Philippine national liberation struggle, he told me:

I think it’s the other way around. We are mostly censored here. It’s mostly a campaign of putting material out there. Even when Viva films released “Made in Malacanang” [a recent historically revisionist pro-Marcos film³⁰] I don’t think we ever called for its boycott. What we did, though, was make a film in response to that. A year later, Joel Lamangan made Oras de Peligro and released it the same week as the sequel to “Made in Malacanang.”³¹

After navigating the contradictions of production, Filipino filmmakers are regulated and censored in exhibition and distribution. Lost Sabungeros, a documentary about the disappearance of over 30 cockfighting aficionados, played at QCinema the year I attended, after Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival canceled its premiere, citing “security concerns” they never elaborated on. Some speculated that the e-sabong (online cockfight gambling) tycoon “Atong” Ang and Senator Ronald dela Rosa (a chief orchestrator of ex-president Rodrigo Duterte’s extrajudicial killings³²)—dangerous individuals implicated in the disappearances by the film—forced Cinemalaya to cancel the screening. More likely it was due to the romantic connection³³ between “Tonyboy” Cojuangco, the Chairman of Cinemalaya, and actress Gretchen Barretto, who is directly implicated in the murders by the film.
In the same year, the festival premiered a documentary about the enforced disappearance of an activist: JL Burgos’s Alipato at Muog (Flying Embers and a Fortress). But a few weeks later, the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) rated that film “X: NOT FOR PUBLIC EXHIBITION.” They cited, among other reasons, its potential to “undermine the faith and confidence of the people in their government and/or duly-constituted authorities.”
They weren’t wrong. Burgos’s impassioned film about his family’s almost two decades long search for his brother Jonas, a beloved organizer of peasant farmers who was abducted by state forces at a shopping mall in broad daylight, clarifies the irredeemable nature of the current system of Philippine government in an expression of matured rage. In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP) were responsible for his brother’s disappearance. But to this day, no suspect has been cited in contempt; in fact, every one of them has been promoted to sterling military and government positions. The principal suspect in the case, General Eduardo Año, is now the national security advisor of the Marcos Jr. Administration.
At a screening and panel that I attended at Adamson University-College of Law, Burgos described a meeting with the MTRCB, where they itemized their reasons for censoring the film, starting with, “What if General Año comes for us?”
“Remember,” the director told the audience, “They’re not the military’s lawyers.”
Of other reasons cited, #7 stays fresh in mind: “Parang leftist (It’s kind of leftist.)”
They also called it “subversive.” Burgos reminded the audience that there is no longer an Anti-Subversion Law.
The moderator asked the panel, including Burgos’s mother Edith and the film’s lawyer, if they considered the “X” rating censorship from a legal standpoint. The lawyer answered without hesitation, “Yes, it is clear. They were using a presidential decree, and we know where presidential decrees come from—the time of Martial Law.” Several months later, in June 2025, the Senate proposed a bill that would expand the MTRCB’s jurisdiction to streaming and digital content and grant it quasi-judicial powers to hear cases and impose sanctions.
A day before it was slated to premiere, a documentary about China’s territorial aggression in the West Philippine Sea, Baby Ruth-Villarama’s Food Delivery, was removed from Puregold Cinepalo Film Festival, though the MTRCB only gave it a mild PG rating.³⁴ On March 12, 2025, the filmmaker and festival director wrote together in a statement, “While the decision was made jointly by the festival organizers and film creators, it is clear that external factors played a role in this outcome.”³⁵
Puregold is the Philippines’ fifth largest supermarket chain. China is the Philippines’ largest importer in general and its third largest importer of food. It would be bad business for Puregold to disappoint its major suppliers. Bigger picture, the Philippines is caught in the middle of the US’s impending war with China and bound to absorb the brunt of the crossfire. Despite many viewers and reviewers conflating Food Delivery’s censorship with progressiveness, the film is in fact unabashed propaganda for the US-backed Armed Forces of the Philippines, which, like the Philippine National Police, directly originates from the Philippine constabulary who served as a frontline in the genocide of over a million of their own people in the Philippine-American war.
With film festivals mostly taking place in mega malls, where political dynasties peddle foreign products, independent filmmakers are not only unlikely to receive a commercial or independent theatrical release, but are at risk of censorship even after they secure a festival premiere. Consciously or not, this curbs filmmakers from pitching projects for development (they also rely on festivals like QCinema and Puregold Cinepalo for funding and access to industry-standard production equipment) that might offend any international stakeholders, whose diversifying interests can be difficult to account for. Safer, then, to retreat into postmodern remixes of narrative and form or to relegate the violent political reality of 90%³⁶ of Filipinos to background atmosphere, occasionally trickling into the isolated drama of individuals, couples, or families fussing distractingly in the foreground.
The same year that Lost Sabungeros’s screenings were canceled at Cinemalaya, Ayala staff sabotaged³⁷ the festival’s Philippine premiere of Asog, a documentary-narrative feature about how Ayala, the real-estate giant, stole the land of over 6,000 people who were displaced by Super Typhoon Haiyan.³⁸ All Cinemalaya screenings that year were held exclusively in five Ayala Mall Cinemas.
Of theatrical bookings in mall cineplexes, Deyto explained:

There are at most three Philippine titles competing with one another, and you have everything else slotted to Hollywood—[sometimes at least] two screens per title. By the principle of free competition we are already defeated.³⁹

Checking Gateway Mall’s showtimes as I write this line (April 11th, 2025), 9 out of 11 screens are playing Hollywood movies: The Amateur, Captain America: Brave New World, Drop, The Minecraft Movie, Mickey 17, Nosferatu, Locked, Snow White. The two Filipino titles are Lilim and My Love Will Make You Disappear (a studio dramedy about an unironic romance between a tenant and her landlord). Several cineplexes today are not showing any movies produced in the Philippines. A few slots are sometimes reserved for popular titles from East and Southeast Asia.
After Hollywood seized global hegemony from the European film industries that collapsed during World War I, a cartel of major American studios including Warner Bros., Universal, and MGM established branches and theaters in the Philippines. According to Nick Deocampo’s Film: American Influences on Philippine Cinema (2011), the US State Department, backed by the looming threat of US military bases, threatened to decrease Philippine sugar exports if the Philippine Congress “adopted protectionist measures to limit the number of US films on local screens.” Posed with this threat to a major cash crop, the Philippine Congress dropped its “protectionist posture,” and for their cooperation the occupier rewarded them with increased sugar exports, albeit temporarily. At the time, 80% of the films shown on local screens were American. By the mid-1930s that percentage reached around 95%. Wielding its political, military, and economic influence, the US forced its cultural propaganda on the Philippines via the mass media and Hollywood, which advertised the superiority of American imports and beauty standards, imposed the English language (unlike European film industries, Hollywood did not provide Tagalog subtitles), and manufactured consent in the people for their own exploitation and repression.
Today, branches of US distributors like Warner Bros. Philippines must be nationally owned and operated according to law. But as recently as 2017, US studios were still taking 70% of the net box office.⁴⁰ Hollywood has kept its hold over the Philippine box office, now with local middle-management integrated for plausible deniability. Under the current Marcos Jr. Administration’s neoliberal economic “ChaCha” (Charter Change),⁴¹ though, direct foreign ownership of Philippine mass media⁴² (and other sectors) could soon return. Even when the Philippine government was at its most stringently protectionist following the country’s devastation by Japan and the US in World War II, imposing an import control tax that halved Hollywood’s box office in the country, “Hollywood outgunned local film production by 4 to 1.”⁴³

Hollywood begins booking [in theaters] 12 months earlier here [Deyto said]. That’s unfair, because if we want to compete we have to rapidly speed up our production—which, in the current state of things, would only lessen the quality of our work—and the quality of our people. If we want to show the most mainstream [Philippine] movies in theaters, they end up finalizing the film a month before their intended showing date. That’s a very short period to warm up audiences to your material.⁴⁴

Philippine productions already shoot at a breakneck pace over a short span and inordinate working hours. Vivamax, the studio that produces the bulk of the country’s feature-length productions, according to Deyto, had recently (at the time of our discussion in late 2024) shot a feature in just two days and had been reported for a 20-hour workday. In my discussions with filmmakers, all of them acknowledged 24+ hour workdays as a regular occurrence in both commercial and independent production.
Between 2023 and 2024, Vivamax increased its productivity by 50%. “We reached a pre-1980s number this year,” he said of overall features produced. “Before we were boasting about 300 during martial law. Right now, we’re at 280 feature films, and 70% of it is Viva.” But Vivamax releases the vast majority of its productions (mostly softcore porn) directly to its own streaming channel, while its theatrical distribution is mostly reserved for foreign titles by Universal, Paramount, CJ Entertainment, etc.
Even last year’s Eddie Garcia Law,⁴⁵ ostensibly passed to improve on-set labor conditions, seemed, according to Mayday Multimedia Executive Director Brian Sulcipan, intended to say to international investors in film: “This country is ready for your capital.”
Sulcipan is also a member of Eyes on Set, an initiative responding to the law’s lack of built-in enforcement of its own low standards. “[Cultural workers] were wondering if the law was going to be used to facilitate more international productions in the country,” Sulcipan said.⁴⁶ As a labor advocate familiar with the general conditions of workers, he was also surprised the law allowed for 14-hour workdays when similar laws for other sectors uphold 8–12-hour day limits. “It’s a standard that is still open to exploitation. It kind of just reiterates most of the existing labor laws for the film industry, which of course were never much to begin with.”⁴⁷
Deyto explained:

There is that collaboration between the ruling classes of cinema here and Hollywood that makes it even more difficult to actually benefit the market…. Because technically people who should be supporting you are against you. The bookers believe they can only play three Filipino titles per week to avoid competition. They do not recognize Hollywood as a competition to local films. Instead they are thinking that local films are [only] competing with one another. But there’s not much of a science to it. It’s a classic ruling class assumption, that we just need to follow because they said so.⁴⁸

Between the first and third quarters of 2024, SM⁴⁹ reported a Php 12 billion increase in box office revenue (not including concessions). As local production declines and grows more dependent on international co-productions, local cinemas, showing predominantly Hollywood films, have increased their profit. “It makes you wonder why isn’t it going back to the industry,” Deyto said. “Unless they are not counting themselves as part of it, which is a problem. Is it really a separate thing?”⁵⁰
Films produced outside of the Philippine studio system are rarely if ever booked in mall cinemas. Only through his collaboration with President Marcos Jr.’s godson and ex-creative communications adviser Paul Soriano, was the internationally renowned Lav Diaz able to show his 250-minute film Phantosmia in mall cineplexes like Ayala, Gateway, and SM this January (2025). His epic-in-length body of work often reckons with legacies of martial law under the Marcos regime, which is why his proximity to the dynasty today (through Soriano and his production company Ten17P) has raised some eyebrows even among fans.⁵¹ Their collaborations began when Diaz and his producers were unable to secure European funding for A Lullaby to a Sorrowful Mystery (2016) and had to search for the money back home⁵² For his Gael Garcia Bernal starring Magellan, which premiered at Cannes this year, he seems to have secured a higher budget through a calculated collaboration between local Blackcap Pictures and Ten17P (Soriano) and foreign co-producers, including Rosa Filmes (Portugal), Andergraun Films (Spain), Lib Films (France), El Viaje Films (Spain), and Volos Films (Taiwan), which took seven years to come to fruition. To upscale film production and distribution, Philippine filmmakers are pushed into convoluted co-productions and relations with local compradors only to elaborately recreate a colonizer’s 16th century circumnavigation of the globe to say again that he is bad.
In fairness, it seems the 164-minute Magellan is not the film Diaz wanted to make, but the feature-length concession to his co-producers in order to realize the 9-hour director’s cut (closer to his usual runtimes) that he referenced frequently in early press.⁵³ More recently, Diaz has made a point of calling this 9-hour cut not a director’s cut of Magellan, but a separate film altogether. Perhaps it is the film he most wanted to make, within the already limited confines of the kind of films that can be made under such a deal.
The government film agency under the office of the President, the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP), acquires foreign independent titles for distribution in commercial mall cinemas (sold at a discounted ticket price) but does not offer the same support to Philippine independent titles. Current FDCP chairman Joey Reyes told me he was interested in “a kind of solution/program to help [Filipino] filmmakers with distribution,” but explained, “although we cannot distribute films, we can facilitate films to be distributed by big companies abroad.”⁵⁴ It’s unclear to me what keeps the government agency from licensing local titles when they continue to acquire foreign ones.
Like the festival heads, Reyes also believes co-productions are part of the solution.

One thing we realized, the Filipino movie industry is in really bad shape! Let me put it this way, as of last year, we had a grand total of 57 films shown [theatrically]. These are both independent and mainstream movies. And out of 57 there were only three that made money. It’s the job of the agency to find out the reason behind this and how we can sustain the local movie industry—and one solution is we need the co-productions. All over the world, everybody is doing co-productions. Every film council has film incentives to offer. Unfortunately we are not a rich country, we cannot even compete with Thailand or Saudi Arabia, but we have to match this with something else.⁵⁵

In fact, to repeat a watchword of the national democratic movement, the Philippines is rich but the people are poor. Its riches are exported to already rich nations, who offer a fraction of it back with expanding terms and conditions.
Through Reyes, I was surprised to learn that the Philippines was the first country in Asia to impose a digital tax on Netflix.

The digital tax is mostly dedicated to cinema production [Reyes explained]…. So hopefully we can get more funds to seed money to co-finance films by Filipino producers who they know will not necessarily be commercial to the Filipino audience alone but will have global appeal…. There has to be the importance of cooperation, of co-production and collaboration. It’s a trend all over the world that you get investments. And you better start creating works worthy of these investments. Stop thinking of just the Filipino audience, although you still should make work for the Filipino audience.⁵⁶

The Philippine government, however, infamously misappropriates public funds, most recently and infamously with the billions (USD) it stole from the people for “Ghost Flood Projects,” or the nonfunctioning/nonexistent public-private flood prevention developments that have left Filipinos susceptible to mass death and displacement by typhoons. And as we’ve seen for decades, the further opening of Philippine industries to foreign capital and control has only made the nation diversely dependent and more cut off from its own resources, which would be enough to provide its every need several times over. Co-productions in the world capitalist system and between reactionary ruling classes in different capitalist countries are not a viable solution for liberating the Philippine film industry, for making it self-sustainable, or for returning it to some nostalgic prior condition.
An example of what ASEAN film solidarity looks like currently: While I attended a festive dinner for Cannes Directors Factory’s cast and crew at CMB Film Services Inc., the largest film equipment rental house in the Philippines, a video started to play unannounced on a massive screen overlooking our tables. We watched a drone camera as it soared over miles of eerily vacant land, tourist resorts, and film sets in Yangon, Myanmar. CMB, it turned out, had purchased all these and erected an overseas rental house in partnership with Forever Group, a real estate and media giant known for its intimate ties to Myanmar’s fascist military junta and its brazen, pro-junta propaganda, spread across four major television channels and two radio stations. CMB also revitalized Forever Group’s Myanmar Media Development Center, an incubator for producing new reactionary media makers.
With Myanmar’s tourism industry freefalling since the 2021 military coup and the junta’s relentless airstrikes on often already internally displaced people, it’s hard to imagine CMB not buying the private land—presumably stolen and long unused—for a steal.
When the video ended, CMB offered the Filipino and international filmmakers at the dinner a free day of shooting on their new land and sets in Myanmar.

Metro Manila Film Festival

There is a single exception to Hollywood’s domination of Philippine theatrical screens and box office. For at least one week a year since 1975, movie theaters nationwide show only Filipino movies for the Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF). It was an initiative of then Manila Mayor Antonio Villegas⁵⁷ to showcase the national cinema in first-run movie houses otherwise reserved for Hollywood.
Partnering with the Metro Manila Development Authority, “the MMFF is more of a memorandum order than a regulation,” Deyto explained. “So it is left as a suggestion for private enterprises [to only show MMFF films].”⁵⁸ Because it was always highly lucrative for cineplexes to screen the festival program, it was in their interest to obey the city’s polite suggestion. MMFF began on Christmas day and lasted until early to mid-January, prime box office season. “American distributors got offended [by the loss of a week of profitable playdates],”⁵⁹ Deyto told me. “Jack Valenti came here, the president of the MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] at the time, and threatened Imelda Marcos that, if they continue, they’ll stop importing sugar.”
But when the FDCP shifted MMFF programming to independent rather than commercial movies by tweaking a submission guideline in 2016, theaters dropped out of the festival for the first time and kept to their usual Hollywood programming.

Until now, I don’t think FDCP has disclosed the box office earnings of the 2016 festival [Deyto said].… I think everything flopped at the time.⁶⁰
While you’re talking to me right now, I’m not a socialist. I always ask for the bare minimum, and that is government regulation [laughs]. [Cinemas pulling out of MMFF is] all the consequence of self-regulation. I do think the businesses, not the people, should be regulated by the government. But the state is regulating the people and not the businesses.⁶¹

Today, MMFF programming is split between mainstream and independent films and has semi-recovered its earning power. In 2023, it broke its own box office record by raking in Php 1.069 billion (roughly USD 18.85 million). But in 2024, the festival attendance declined by an estimated 720,000⁶² people and only a few titles made money. The day before the 2023 MMFF, the Manila Bulletin published the article “Is MMFF fair? Hollywood studios say no, cite trade barriers.”⁶³ In it, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) called for the end of the “screen restriction” (which we know is just a suggestion) of MMFF, “oppressive” taxation, and restrictions on foreign ownership in the domestic film industry. They’ve also found loopholes. Mall cinemas today can show American blockbusters in IMAX and 3D theaters while they play MMFF films on standard screens (no locally produced films have been shot on IMAX cameras, which are not available to rent in the Philippines).
In a strange development, Hollywood has begun acquiring MMFF titles, allowing them to get their hands on the only week of Philippine box office that they’ve ever been denied. In 2023, Warner Bros. Pictures acquired Mallari, a horror film about the country’s first known serial killer. It is the first mainstream Filipino movie that Warner Bros. Pictures is distributing in the country.⁶⁴ Brian Diamante, the founder of the Philippine production company behind the film, said, “Warner Bros. is very particular on their standard, and they have rules. To keep up with that, somehow we have to spend more. The film itself cost us Php 80 million [1.4 million USD].”⁶⁵ It was the most expensively produced film at MMFF that year and the second-highest grossing.
In 2024, it was uncanny to see Hollywood studio logos brandished onto the front and back of MMFF titles that most Americans will never hear about: Warner Bros. Pictures acquired The Uninvited and Columbia Pictures acquired Green Bones. It is the first time in eight years that Columbia Pictures (now owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment) is distributing a Philippine produced title. With Hollywood production faltering (its budgets inflating as their global sales dwindle) will they continue to shift toward allowing more Philippine cinema to be produced and released in theaters, so long as they can retain rights and their split of the box office? Are they beginning to seed loose pocket change to produce lucrative local cinema in exchange for that ownership? Deyto joined me in speculating, “This might be Hollywood’s move to stop non-American titles from flowing over to other regions: buy their distribution licenses and release them in a limited manner, only to never release them again.”⁶⁶

Hollywood-Manila Bridge

Peasants in the Philippines have suffered from landlessness for centuries, and every land reform since the Spanish era has failed to shift the distribution of land from a faint fraction of a fraction of the population to the vast majority. The homes of urban poor, like those in Sitio San Roque, are being demolished on public land, while local and foreign movie productions are offered cheap or free temporary access to it to produce film commodities that appeal to the international market.
In March 2025, Hollywood executives met with First Lady Liza Marcos at the Sunset Marquis hotel in West Hollywood to launch a program to attract more foreign productions to the Philippines. They pushed to streamline government permits, waive visa fees, reach 25% cash rebates, and make new grants for international co-productions. Winston Emano, the founder of the media strategy firm that moderated the launch, considered the initiative “an expansion” of the so-called “Hollywood-Manila Bridge concept.”⁶⁷
“With so many locations owned or controlled by the government, these can be catalogued and these locations offered free of charge not just to foreign productions but to local productions, too,” said Jun Lope Juban Jr., one of the “go-to guys for international productions in the Philippines,”⁶⁸ present at the convening with the fascist Marcos.
Juban has facilitated such blockbuster Philippine shoots as The Bourne Legacy, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and Apocalypse Now. At the beginning of a documentary about the making of the Francis Ford Coppola film, Hearts of Darkness, production designer Dean Tavoularis says,

There were 600 people working on this thing. In Hollywood or New York, it’s quite a big deal if you want [to hire] another person—the fringes and salaries—it’s thousands of dollars! So for a dollar a day or three dollars a day—I hope we weren’t taking advantage of people, but that’s what they were paid. So you could get, not one person, but ten, twenty, or a hundred!⁶⁹

Early in Eleanor Coppola’s book Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now, construction coordinator John La Sandra tells the author, summarizing (perhaps incidentally) the semi-feudal system maintained in the Philippines by the US and its compradors, “Manpower costs less than machine power here.”⁷⁰
The ability to exploit cheap labor and cheaply or freely access land in the Philippines, with the “legal” protection (like the Eddie Garcia Law⁷¹) and facilitation of local bureaucrat capitalists, remains a draw to foreign productions. These are often justified by claiming they benefit the local economy. But in Baler,⁷² where the Apocalypse Now crew set up their HQ, the production “caused severe food shortages in the marketplace that forced most residents to go without meat and many produce items, causing a tripling of beef prices.”⁷³ Often, these deregulated foreign productions simply reproduce already normalized wage exploitation, destruction of the environment, and privileges to land.
Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. and his cronies, however, did profit from Coppola’s renting of guns, fighter jets, military trucks, and 40 Huey Helicopters, which the regime reserved the right to recall from set at a moment’s notice to strafe and bomb peasants, indigenous people, and guerrillas in the countryside.

Cinemaralita, a Film Festival at a Barricade

In 2019, a film program supported a barricade in Sitio San Roque, at the height of the community’s resistance to the recurring demolitions of their homes by Ayala Land and the QC Local Government Unit. As part of a traveling festival organized by SIKAD (a cultural national democratic mass organization for the urban poor) called “Cinemaralita,” documentaries and short genre films were projected onto the remains of one of the 700 houses that were razed the year before to build the Enrique Razon resort-casino mentioned before. This half-demolished home of a taxi driver (still living nearby on the premises) was repurposed into an assembly area for demonstrations, meetings, and workshops, where volunteer artists integrated with San Roque residents and together produced artwork about the community’s history and experiences. This was part of a larger anti-demolition, barikada (barricade) campaign with an alliance of residents and organizations including KADAMAY, which has organized several campaigns for the urban poor and housing occupations over the years.
According to the essay “Cinemaralita and the Prospect of a Radical Film Aesthetic from Community Feedback,”⁷⁴ written by members of SIKAD (including Deyto), the goal of the film screenings were

mainly aligned with the political aspect of community organizing: first, to boost the morale of the community members who are on night watch to guard against anticipated demolitions and its lurking task force; second, to consolidate the members and to respond to the Barikada campaign through vigil night programs; then lastly, to gain more external support from other chapters, allies from middle-forces and multi-sectoral solidarity.⁷⁵

The organizers note how residents asked to rewind the film to reference certain scenes in discussion and how they learned from critical audience feedback. For example, one response was that the inclusion of profanity and certain imagery made it less inclusive for younger audience members. In the essay, the SIKAD organizers work through situating the role of the program:

The community members are also part of the general cinema audience. Which means they are within the realm of mainstream taste, the taste perpetrated by the bourgeoisie. However, due to the political nature of Cinemaralita, this was never really considered an issue. As cited in the goals of Cinemaralita above, it is less concerned with such limits of bourgeois taste than it is with political organizing.⁷⁶

They go on to write about decentering cinema from “the aggrandizement of the film-artist, moving toward the audience” and about its more active, radical potentials. They remain lucid throughout, reminding us once more in the end that it “is not by forcing the general audience to see what bourgeois aesthetics view as ‘radical,’ ‘avant-garde’ or ‘experimental’ that radicalization in film happens, but in having films and filmmakers participate in radical political projects.”⁷⁷
They do not contrast the Cinemaralita Barikada program against that year’s QCinema, which would kick off two months later within walking distance. The class struggle of the overall barikada campaign hacks closer to the root of the basic problems which lead to secondary, cultural contradictions like QCinema than any counter use of cinema or counter film festival. In the Philippines, there are cultural national democratic mass organizations (sometimes even more than one) dedicated to supporting each sector in a given area. Cultural workers are and have been ubiquitously engaged in class struggle alongside peasants and the proletariat. The national democratic movement is uniting the broadest possible united front of stable and unstable allies—including the proletariat, peasantry, petit bourgeoisie, and willing elements of the national bourgeoisie—against an increasingly isolated 1%, the big comprador bourgeoise and big landlords.
It is not merely by removing cinema from its navel that it will be liberated. Nor by striking cultural institutions, though US artists have privileges they’ve yet to leverage against them. As the SIKAD organizers put it, “the protracted struggle is not just a struggle within the industry and between filmmakers and their style.”⁷⁸ Radical films and radical programming cannot by themselves, or even primarily, liberate even just the film industry, nor can they be considered a fully liberated use of the medium. That comes later in a classless society. At this point in history, we can create cinema toward our independence, in collaboration with revolutionary and national democratic mass organizations, but there is no such a thing as “independent cinema.”
What is to be done, then? The answer will differ per your national liberation struggle and the situation of your surplus industrial cinema. But Deyto has outlined a forthright program for the “Revitalization of Philippine Cinema” in his book Post-Dilawan⁷⁹[(a pejorative term for liberal]) Cinema and the Pandemic with core lessons that might be adaptable to different contexts.

***

This is the reason why independent cinema—that is cinema that is not dependent on any institution and that is fully decentered—does not exist here. On every claim of independence is the violence that made its appearance—not its actual existence—possible: the decline of public spaces, dwindling numbers of public transportation, further defunding of public education funneled into the Vice President’s corrupt schemes, the killing of teachers, the killing of artists, the killing of activists, the killing of youth, the killing of the poor, and all those deaths that loom around us. Philippine cinema—historically—is a cinema shifted by changes of domination, [whose] maintenance is always [precarious] and driven by fear.
We—as an audience, filmmakers, or even citizens—probably know what kind of actual violence is needed for independence to happen. Whether that be independence in cinema or other things. We know the potential of violence to alter things—just like how the state’s violence [has] alter[ed] our lives for the past decades without any significant changes. From this logic, we know that significant change requires a significantly different quality of violence. We know the kind of violence that is needed to maintain the happiness of the few, and we also know that a quantitatively different kind of violence is needed for us to finally experience happiness and enjoyment. If what awaits in the future is death from the violence of the state, we also know that it will take a different kind of violence to alter this future towards living.⁸⁰

13-Point Program for the Revitalization of Philippine Cinema:

1. Death to the Landlords!
2. The national bourgeoisie must succumb to the masses, redistribute land and wealth!
3. Death to the Marcoses!
4. Death to the Cojuangco-Aquinos!⁸¹
5. Death to the Dutertes!
6. Double death to the Marcoses and Cojuangco-Aquinos and Dutertes!
7. Death to US Imperialism!
8. Death to Chinese Imperialism!
9. Down with neoliberalism! Defenders be put to people’s court!
10. Put class traitors into trial in the people’s court!
11. Resume the GRP-NDFP peace talks!⁸² Oust the next president of the Philippines if this is not on the table!
12. Onwards People’s Agenda! Sign and Implement CASER [Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms]!⁸³
13. If your cinema disagrees with any of these, death to your cinema!⁸⁴

1. QCinema and Sitio San Roque are located about 4 km apart in the “North Triangle” of Quezon City, the wealthiest of 16 cities in Metro Manila since 2020. It is a hub for business, retail, higher education (University of the Philippines Diliman, Ateneo, etc.), Information and Communications Technology, Philippine mass media (such as television networks ABS-CBN and GMA and all major film studios and agencies). Sitio San Roque is located on public land near numerous government agencies like the Department of Public Works and Highways, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency and the Public-Private Partnership Center.
2. Epoy Deyto, “Double Feature: QCinema and Sitio San Roque,” missing codec, November 9, 2023, https://www.missingcodec.com/essay/double-feature-qcinema-and-sitio-san-roque/.
3. Junior Philippine Geographical Society, “Counter-mapping: Sitio San Roque, Philippines,” Guerilla Cartography, June 27, 2022, https://www.guerrillacartography.org/blog/counter-mapping-sitio-san-roque-philippines.
4. For decades, the Dalena sisters have made experimental, narrative, and documentary films and art in other mediums about the National Democratic Movement and the Communist Party of the Philippines and its underground movement.
5. Jayson Rubrico, “Demolisyon sa Brgy. Bagong Lipunan ng Crame, QC, nauwi sa gulo; Higit 300 pamilya, apektado,” SMNI News Channel, November 8, 2024, https://smninewschannel.com/demolisyon-sa-brgy-bagong-lipunan-ng-crame-qc-nauwi-sa-gulo-higit-300-pamilya-apektado/.
6. Smallest territorial and administrative district and local government unit. Fights and other neighborhood squabbles are usually mediated by the barangay captain.
7. Epoy Deyto, “Double Feature: QCinema and Sitio San Roque,” missing codec, November 9, 2023 https://www.missingcodec.com/essay/double-feature-qcinema-and-sitio-san-roque/.
8. Transcribed while attending the festival opening.
9. From notes I took while attending the Case Studies on Co-Production: Cannes Directors’ Factory panel in person on November 11, 2024.
10. From my discussions with Deyto.
11. From my interview with a local screenwriter who chose not to be named to protect their career and professional relationships.
12. https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/production-countries/#tab=year.
13. This is according to The Numbers, which calls itself “the largest freely-available database of movie business information on the web.” It overrepresents the US box office because it lacks comprehensive box office data for non-US countries; Therefore, the US probably accounts for an even smaller percentage of the global box office.
14. From my interview with the anonymous local screenwriter.
15. A person from Visayas, the southern provinces.
16. Villablanca has roots in Leyte and Cebu, where there is a history of regional, Cebuano Cinema distinct from the dominant Tagalog and Hollywood cinemas of Manila. After a brief boom in the ’50s, with some Cebuano movie-stars making Hollywood appearances, the industry struggled to compete with the scale of the Tagalog industry and greatly declined in the ’60s onward. Today, there are grassroots efforts for independent Cebuano cinema like the Binisaya International Film Festival, but resources are scant, and tensions continue to brew around misrepresentation and exclusion of the Visayan islands and other provinces by the Manila-centric industry.
17. According to Ibon Foundation, the price per kilo of well-milled rice in the Philippines in 2025 rose from Php 43 to Php 48; regular milled rice from Php 39 to Php 40; imported garlic from Php 110 to Php 156; baguio beans from Php 120 to Php 131; galunggong from Php 259 to Php 267; and chicken from Php 200 to Php 223.
    Meanwhile, the average minimum wage across the country is Php 481, just enough to afford some chicken, rice, and vegetables. It’s a wonder how people manage to cover just rent and utilities. Although cost of living is cheaper in some ways than in the US, many essential imported goods, tech, and tools are more expensive. In my time in the Philippines, the only thing that always cost less was service (jeepneys, taxis, tool, and vehicle repairs, physical therapy, etc.) due to extremely low wages.
18. Produced by Unyon ng Manggagawa sa Agrikultura (UMA) and Mayday Multimedia; it can be watched for free at https://cinemata.org/view?m=vceTZuvtB.
19. I attended hearings of many people in ICE detention at the end of the Biden administration, where it was clear that everyone who “chose” to self-deport simply could not withstand the terrible conditions inside the detention centers long enough to resolve their status—a deliberately labyrinthine process that seemed almost impossible to complete with the additional obstacles of being detained. Almost all the detainees described feeling mentally and physically “unwell” and needing to get out as soon as possible.
20. From my conversations with Deyto.
21. Silverlens co-founder Isa Lorenzo is the sister of Regina Lorenzo, Chair and CEO of the Lapanday Food Corporation. The Lorenzos are an infamous agribusiness family. In 2016, Lapanday guards shot and injured at least seven farmers who were asserting their right to land which was awarded them the year before.
22. Just south of Metro Manila.
23. “Philex Rushing to Open Destructive Mining in Surigao Del Norte,” Ang Bayan Ngayon, March 20, 2024, https://philippinerevolution.nu/angbayan/philex-rushing-to-open-destructive-mining-in-surigao-del-norte/.
24. There have been widespread calls to boycott German cultural institutions in response to the German state’s repression of Palestinians and Pro-Palestine activists. At the 2024 Berlinale, or Berlin International Film Festival, Executive Director Mariëtte Rissenbeek condemned Hamas for October 7 and called for the release of Israeli hostages. Many filmmakers were viciously attacked by German media and politicians for delivering pro-Palestine speeches at the festival. And Berlinale filed criminal charges over “antisemitic posts” when someone hacked their social media accounts and released a statement as if the festival was actually holding itself accountable for its complicity in the genocide.
25. Angelo Suarez, “More and more galleries and art platforms are being unmasked,” Facebook, October 12, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CiA4Pk5DP/.
26. Elsa Keslassy, “Mubi Boss Efe Cakarel Clarifies Relationship With New Investor After Backlash Over Israeli Military Ties, Sets Advisory Body and Fund for ‘Artists at Risk’,” August 14, 2025, https://variety.com/2025/film/global/mubi-ceo-responds-backlash-sequoia-investment-1236488609/.
27. US Military Exercises destroy the environment and prevent fisherfolk from working while Chinese vessels steal their catch and use force to terrorize them.
28. Cultural worker and volunteer for Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura (UMA, Federation of Agricultural Workers).
29. Angelo Suarez, “More and more galleries and art platforms are being unmasked,” Facebook, October 12, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CiA4Pk5DP/.
30. Epoy Deyto, “Maid in Malacanang,” missing codec, August 4, 2022, https://www.missingcodec.com/cinema/maid-in-malacanang-2022/.
31. From my discussions with Deyto.
32. Bonz Magsambol, “Would you believe, drug war ‘architect’ Dela Rosa to launch own probe inviting Duterte?,” October 16, 2024, www.rappler.com/newsbreak/inside-track/dela-rosa-launch-own-senate-probe-inviting-rodrigo-duterte/.
33. Rachelle Siazon, “Tonyboy Cojuangco 27-year relationship with Gretchen Barretto,” February 3, 2021, https://www.pep.ph/news/local/156477/tonyboy-cojuangco-gretchen-barretto-27th-anniversary-a716-20210203.
34. Lé Baltar, “‘Feels like censorship’: Baby Ruth Villarama on West PH Sea docu’s film fest removal,” Rappler, March 15, 2025, https://www.rappler.com/entertainment/movies/interview-baby-ruth-villarama-food-delivery-west-philippine-sea-documentary-censorship/.
35. Manual to Lyf, “Joint Statement On the Withdrawal of ‘Food Delivery’ From the Puregold Cinepanalo Film Festival,” Facebook, March 25, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/manualtolyf/photos/joint-statement-on-the-withdrawal-of-food-delivery-from-the-puregold-cinepanalo-/1137096618429708/.
36. The percentage of the Philippine population that makes up the peasantry and proletariat according to Philippine Society and Revolution. Amado Guerrero, Philippine Society and Revolution (Pulang Tala Publications, 1971).
37. “Asogfilm, “Why did one of Asia’s biggest corporations just try to sabotage the national premiere of this microbudget film?” Instagram, August 10, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/C-fzBxMv-SH/.
38. One of the most intense tropical cyclones ever recorded and among the deadliest to ever hit the Philippines. In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan (or Yolanda as it’s known locally) struck the Visayas region. The Philippine government’s privatized, corporate-led and investment-driven rehabilitation program ensured the affected masses remained devastated while a ruling few profited massively from the death, destruction, and displacement.
39. From my discussions with Deyto.
40. Michael Lim, Philippine Cinema and the Cultural Economy of Distribution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03608-9.
41. Refers to Bong Bong Marcos Jr.’s amendments to provisions in the 1987 Constitution, essentially further liberalizing foreign direct investment in mining, water, and land while expanding terms in office, particularly the presidency.
42. Delon Porcalla, “Lawmaker backs foreign media ownership under Cha-cha,” Philstar Global, February 4, 2023, https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2023/02/24/2247244/lawmaker-backs-foreign-media-ownership-under-cha-cha.
43. Nick Deocampo, Philippine Cinema and History (Bughaw, 2023), 368.
44. From my discussions with Deyto.
45. Named after the veteran actor. In 2019, he tripped on a cable wire and broke his neck while filming a TV series. There was no medical team on standby. The law aims to enhance the protection of workers in the movie and television industry by improving safety and working conditions, regulating work hours, requiring employers to comply with the minimum labor standards in the Philippines, etc.
46. From my discussions with Brian Sulcipan.
47. From my discussions with Brian Sulcipan.
48. From my discussions with Deyto.
49. The SM Group of Companies ran by the Sy Family, among Asia’s twenty wealthiest families.
50. From my discussions with Deyto.
51. Lé Baltar, “‘Phantosmia’ review: Memory as olfactory hallucination,” Rappler, September 28, 2024, https://www.rappler.com/entertainment/movies/lav-diaz-phantosmia-review-memory-olfactory-hallucination/.
52. Michael Guarneri, «Lav Diaz: Philippines Year Zero» Débordements, October 2, 2018, https://debordements.fr/lav-diaz/.
53. Melanie Goodfellow, “Lav Diaz Hints At Cannes Debut For Ferdinand Magellan Film With Gael García Bernal; Reveals Near-Death Experience: ‘It Became A Personal Journey To Understanding Immortality’,” Deadline, April 6, 2025, https://deadline.com/2025/04/lav-diaz-hints-cannes-ferdinand-magellan-gael-garcia-bernal-1236361133/#:~:text=Talking%20to%20Deadline%20after%20the,the%20project%20eight%20years%20ago.
54. From my discussions with Joey Reyes.
55. From my discussions with Joey Reyes.
56. From my discussions with Joey Reyes.
57. Villegas was part of the Liberal Party, the opposition party to Marcos Sr.’s Nacionalista Party. Although they played an unstable but important role in exposing the outright corruption of the Marcos regime, policy-wise they were functionally similar: Open the Philippine economy for foreign benefit while also flaunting superficial “Filipino First” initiatives, often in the cultural sector. Villegas moved (or fled?) to the United States with his family in 1972 after being implicated or initially framed in the Plaza Miranda Bombings, now generally understood to be a potential false flag operation to consolidate the regime and impose martial law the following year.
58. From my discussions with Deyto.
59. “First Metro Film Festival,” Philstar, May 20, 2017, https://www.philstar.com/entertainment/2017/05/20/1701938/first-metro-film-festival.
60. From my discussions with Deyto.
61. From my discussions with Deyto.
62. Isagani de Castro Jr., “[ANALYSIS] MMFF won’t break P1-billion box-office record: Is Philippine cinema dead?,” Rappler, January 15, 2025, https://www.rappler.com/voices/rappler-blogs/analysis-metro-manila-film-festival-box-office-2024/.
63. Ben Arnold de Vera, “Is MMFF fair? Hollywood studios say no, cite trade barriers,” Manila Bulletin, December 24, 2024, https://mb.com.ph/2024/12/24/hollywood-slams-mmff-cites-trade-barriers.
64. “Warner Bros. in pioneering domestic film distribution pact,” Context.ph, November 26, 1993, https://context.ph/2023/11/26/warner-bros-in-pioneering-domestic-film-distribution-pact/.
65. Ted Cordero, “Warner Bros banks on PH movies’ potential, inks deal with Pinoy film company,” GMA Network, November 29, 2023, https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/money/companies/889944/warner-bros-banks-on-ph-movie-sector-s-potential-inks-deal-with-pinoy-film-company/story/.
66. From my discussions with Deyto.
67. Ruben V. Nepales, “Hollywood-Manila bridge: How to lure international productions to film in PH?,” Rappler, March 31, 2025, https://www.rappler.com/entertainment/movies/how-lure-international-productions-film-philippines/.
68. Nepales, “Hollywood-Manila bridge”
69. Transcribed from the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
70. Eleanor Coppola, “August 24, Pagsanjan,” in Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now (Simon and Schuster, 1979), 116.
71. Law that lays out new labor standards for film production but not any means to enforce them.
72. Capital of Aurora province, on the East coast of Luzon. A surfing culture grew here after the release of Apocalypse Now.
73. Gerald Sussman. (1992). “Bulls In The (Indo) China Shop,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 20(1): 24–28, 1992, https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.1992.9943960.
74. Gerone Centeno, Epoy Deyto, and Joshua Sales, “Cinemaralita and the Prospect of a Radical Film Aesthetic from Community Feedback,” in Radical Film, Art, and Digital Media for Societies in Turmoil, eds. Ursula Böckler, Julia Lazarus and Alexandra Weltz-Rombach, (K. Verlag, 2023), 435–443.
75. “Cinemaralita…” 438.
76. “Cinemaralita…” 441.
77. “Cinemaralita…” 442.
78. “Cinemaralita…” 442.
79. Dilawan is a pejorative term for liberal.
80. Epoy Deyto, Post-Dilawan Cinema and the Pandemic, rev. ed. (Shonenbat Books, 2023), 96.
81. Two of the most prominent political dynasties merged with the marriage of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. and Corazon “Cory” Cojuangco, the president after Marcos Sr.
82. Peace talks between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and The National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) have been on and off since 1986. They have not resumed under Bong Bong Marcos Jr.
83. NDFP proposal for reforms as the basis of unity for the broadest united front. The result of dozens of consultations with organized groups in guerilla fronts, progressive mass organizations from various sectors, and marginalized groups.
84. Epoy Deyto, Post-Dilawan Cinema and the Pandemic, rev. ed. (Shonenbat Books, 2023), 99.