Gloria Diaz

Ivan is a writer who can not tear himself away from the city of Manila. He likes to hang out melancholy and flirt with pretty women. One day, he meets Mari.Read More »

The first major epic in the oeuvre of Lav Diaz (b. 1958) is a powerful contemporary portrait of the Filipino diaspora in New York and New Jersey: A Filipino-born detective investigates the murder of Hanzel Harana, a Filipino teenager, and must plod along with tenacity to break through the wall of silence surrounding the boy’s death. The trail of the designer drug “shabu” runs through the film like a bloody trickle, but Diaz delegates the accounts of crime, domestic violence, and the discontent in the souls of his characters to the background for the most part, instead relying on the hypnotic portrait of a decaying life as a symbol of alienation from home. The more we learn about the protagonists, the more complex, intangible, and contradictory our image of them becomes.Read More »

Five and the Skin (French: Cinq et la peau) is a 1982 French drama film directed by Pierre Rissient. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival.

A man, Ivan, returns to Manila, apparently without specific purpose. At the discretion of his wandering and its meetings, the writer ambulate in the fascinating mega city in search of its past and of the meaning of his existence.Read More »

A Filipino teenager (Yul Servo) is shot to death on the sidewalk of New Jersey, USA. An investigation starts into his death. His family members and friends are interviewed. Along the way, we find out not only more about him but about the community of Filipinos in America in general, including the destructive effect of the drug “shabu” on its youth. The detective who handles the case (Joel Torre) also has his own personal demons to settle with his violent past.Read More »

(from Cinemarehiyon)
The picaresque adventures of a young, naive country bumpkin named Kulas (de Leon) and his whimsical encounters with denizens of various nationalities – Spanish, American, Chinese, indio – is a metaphor for the Filipino quest for identity at a time when nationhood was still an imagined concept. Set during the liminal period when the Philippines was in transition from Spanish to American colonial rule, this masterwork shows Romero at his best and most exuberant as a filmmaker. It swept most of the awards at the 1976 Metro Manila Film Festival, and was subsequntly voted best picture at the very first Urian Awards in 1977.Read More »

Pierre Rissient isn’t famous among French public, but he’s a respected critic who has, over many years of serving as consultant to the Cannes Film Festival and other high profile cinema showcases, pushed then unknown and now famous film directors–Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood and Hou Hsiaohsien, among them–into the spotlight. He also has a long experience in the industry, assisted Godard in the making of ‘A bout de souffle’, produced Rohmer’s ‘L’ Anglaise et le duc’, among other things.Read More »