Ariel escaped being run over by a chauffeur-driven car with Cathy and her sister. The movie moved on with the main characters meeting for the second time in the restaurant where Ariel worked as a waiter. She was so smitten she did everything to win him over.
Angelu de LeonCathy
Bobby AndrewsAriel
Caridad SanchezNorma Vergara
Robert ArevaloCathy's FatherSusan Jane RitterIrene
Kim delos SantosMay
Maureen MauricioAriel's Mother
Katya SantosAimeeAngela ZamoraSheilaCamille OcampoVickyThe movie features varied forms of love: family love, sibling love, puppy love, unrequited love, ruined love, prospering love, in denial love, jaded love, and true love, among others. After all, what the world needs now is love.
It is the time of El Niño, a season ruled by superstition and fear. The rain is long in coming, the ground has cracked up dry. The ricestalks are thin and sickly. Villagers go hungry. And a boy dies from a snakebite. The adults splinter. Some pray. Others join a cult to appease earth spirits and wait for the ada, the ricefield spirit goddess of bountiful harvest who dances naked on moonlit nights and signals the need for a virgin’s sacrifice. There are fence sitters, equally pro-church and pro-cult. A landlord’s steward enforces his master’s usury on hapless farmers. A self-righteous priest says rain must first be deserved. Two young women fight for the right to do with their bodies as they please. A bastard boy and a blind girl come of age. Yesterday, they were children.
The title “Kamera Obskura” is a Filipino spelling of the latin “Camera Obscura” which simply means “dark room”. The film’s concept adheres to formalist cinema, where the filmmaker’s thesis is to make a semblance of a vintage film seemingly produced sometime in the late 1920s to early 1930s in the Philippines. The thesis is to conjure up a film from a period that did not really exist in Philippine cinema’s historical cultural heritage as we know it, such as a pseudo-expressionist / experimental Filipino cinema of the silent film era. It is a film within a film. The narrative plays with the idea of a retro-futurist world where a prisoner locked away in a dark chamber for over two decades only sees the reality of the world outside through the small hole in his cell, which projects an image of the city on his wall, the phenomenon of the “camera obscura”.
Every night, Nana Lusing lies on her bed sleepless because she sees a dark figure looming in her room. Who is this shadow? Is this the devil? Her late husband? A manifestation of her anxieties? Or simply a figment of her imagination?
Intoy has had the hots for Doray since they were kids in Kalye Marino, Cavite City, formerly the American Naval Base in Sangley Point. Both marginalized as the long-lasting effect of American abandonment of the said base, Intoy has become Kalye Marino’s best “tahong” caretaker-with-no-angst-about-poverty, while Doray a cheap prostitute-with-no-guilt, tending to her siblings’ needs. Intoy strives to have his own cages of “tahong” so he can have Doray, not for just a night of quickie sex, but forever. But what will he do to when she offers to drop by his hovel-on-stilts to quench his passion, but before it happens Nature has chosen to play a joke on his tahong cage? Will it be goodbye to his tahong business or to his damsel-in-distress and ultimately to Kalye Marino? From Eros S. Atalia’s 2001 Palanca Grand Prize-winning Short Story, Intoy Syokoy ng Kalye Marino is a love tale minus the obligatory romantic sentiments.
Guam, U.S.A. Thursday, November 24, Thanksgiving Day. Alex, a local newspaper photographer, gets into a “green card marriage” with her good friend James, a Guam-born Filipino. Miriam, a former member of the Philippine press and now an established Guam journalist, longs to repair a damaged relationship with her American husband. Ella, a hotel housekeeper for almost 20 years, finds means of sending her 88-year old mother to the Philippines with the uncertainty of coming back. As the island of Guam celebrates this classic American holiday when people count their blessings and give thanks, the lives of the three Filipina immigrants intersect and find themselves at a tug-o-war of sacrifice and significance where they must find their home or must they find it somewhere else.
Circus hijinks surround the barangay of Sta. Maria in the midst of an international murder sensation. Swanie, Sta. Maria’s barangay chair and a distant relative of the killer, tries to gain political points by staging a wake for the criminal-turned-celebrity. Meanwhile in faraway Manila, Joanna, Swanie’s runaway son, navigates his way through labyrinthine bureaucracy, to give a neighbor a proper burial. With these two unrelated deaths, estranged mother and son each bury the dead long shelved in their hearts. Amidst these unspoken family burials, the neighborhoods’ penchant for funeral fiestas, gossip and secrets, bizarre social events and the sheer mix of scandal and inebriation complete the picture of dying the Pinoy way.
One stormy night, in a sea side village, a childless couple finds a mysterious beautiful woman in the beach without any consciousness. The next day, the girl wakes up and introduces herself as Isabel.
A neglected and unloved orphan raised by poor relatives in the slums of Manila is wrongfully convicted of murder that resulted from a heist he was compelled to join. Unable to prove his innocence and his minor age, he is thrown into the cruel, perilous and horrifying world of death row where he is introduced to other inmates all awaiting their execution by lethal injection. One of them is a 70-year-old man who detests the jungle of jail and is feared by all the convicts. He would serve as the boy’s protector and savior and in the process touch and shape enormously the violated youth’s life in prison and beyond.
A young woman gets married but her authoritarian father refuses to let her out of his sight.
About a woman who changes personality to please the man she's with, and about the man who brings her sexuality to full bloom.
LV and her family make their living by operating an illegal off track betting outlet. But things haven't been going well for them lately, and the future is uncertain with Sta. Ana Park closing down.
Dondi is a nerd and an obedient nephew to his aunt Cora who makes decisions for him. Meanwhile, Anna is a stubborn and rebellious girl who seeks the attention of her father Vito. Dondi and Anna cross path and their different personalities collide. They eventually fall in love with each other and solve their own problems. Vito and Cora are bitter business competitors and because of their rivalry, they disapproved the romantic relationship between Dondi and Anna.
Mia, a celebrated writer of romantic-comedy films, is at a turning point in her life which makes it difficult for her to believe that love could last. Everything comes to a head when Ethan returns, only for her to find out that he has become a cynic of lasting love because she broke his heart.
An agent partners with the heiress of a Japanese crime syndicate to put an end to the centuries-old curse that could be responsible for the spate of serial murders taking place in Manila.
On a particularly nondescript weekend afternoon, Edison must deal with his exasperated mother, who is bearing down on him like a force of nature; the looming deadline of a paper on the philosophical writings of Immanuel Kant; and a persistent, insidious force that aims to destroy the tranquility of his existence.
A widower found a strong resemblance between his late wife and the tutor of his daughter. Because he never got over his loss he courted and married her and then proceeded to remake her in the image of his wife. Naive and very much in love she obeyed his wishes and only later realized that her husband was not really in love with her but only with a memory.
Aning is a maid in the Cuevas household. She is raped by an unknown assailant and comes home to the province pregnant. Her older sister Dinya serves the Cuevas household to search for the culprit. She catches the culprit but at the cost of her own vitrue.
The death of Mariel was met with such hurt by her three closest friends. But it was her best friend, Carla that she leaves a most special gift, a box full of her diaries through the years. Carla has been Mariel’s friend since their high school years; they have practically shared everything in their lives together. Their two other girl friends, Sandra and Olive formed the quartet who would get together ever so often and served as a mutual support system. Despite warnings from Sandra and Olive not to read the diaries left behind by Mariel, Carla could not help herself to find out what was written on those volumes of handwritten materials. True enough, what she discovered completely shattered all her perceptions and beliefs of the friendship shared by the four women through the years.