Cinema One Originals Marks 15 years of Delivering Brave Cinematic Experiences, Runs From November 7 to 17

For its fifteenth year, Cinema One Originals loudly and proudly declares what it’s stood for all these years, originality in all its permutations, and challenging old and new audiences if they’re ready for the Cinema One Originals Experience—an experience that goes beyond cinema, beyond cinephilia, beyond entertainment.

All these years, the Cinema One Originals mandate has been to give filmmakers, first-timers and otherwise, a platform to fully express their visions. This year, eight original narrative features get P3 million worth of grant each.  There are four first time filmmakers, three previous Cinema One Originals alumni, and one director making her second feature and her Cinema One Originals debut.

Diverse as the four first-time filmmakers’ visions are, they find common ground in the way they invert their genres, and subgenres, of choice: a bildungsroman, a noir, a gothic horror and a resurrection rom-com. 

J.E. Tiglao makes his feature debut with “Metamorphosis” which stars Gold Aceron, Iana Bernardez, Ivan Padilla, Ricky Davao, and Yayo Aguila in a coming-of-age drama about intersexuality that’s as wistful as it is provocative.  Dustin Celestino reverses the wrong time/wrong place dynamics of noir with a little help from a comet in “Utopia,” a blackly comic riff on the genre starring Enzo Pineda, Joem Bascon, and Aaron Villaflor. Eve Baswel’s “Tia Madre” is a gothic horror featuring Cherie Gil and Jana Agoncillo in which a young girl starts to suspect her mother has been changed into something not quite herself and perhaps not quite human either. Nigel Santos’ “Yours Truly, Shirley” casts Regine Velasquez as a widow who believes a young pop star (Rayt Carreon) is the reincarnation of her late husband.

Returning to Cinema One Originals are Victor Villanueva and Kevin Dayrit, who made their feature film debuts with Cinema One Originals. 

Victor’s resumes his fascination with the intertwining of rom-com tropes with supernatural tinges that made “My Paranormal Romance” a quirky treat with “Lucid”, in which Alessandra De Rossi plays a lucid dreamer whose waking life and dream life start to blur when she meets JM De Guzman. Kevin, whose “Catnip” was the multi-awarded darling of its year takes on vampirism, necrophilia, the drug wars and rom-coms in “O” which stars Anna Luna, Lauren Young and Jasmine Curtis-Smith.

Giancarlo Abrahan whose second feature was the Best Picture-winning Cinema One Original “Paki” returns with “Sila Sila”, which stars Gio Gahol and Topper Fabregas and which he describes as an LGBT ghosting story and which finds him taking another look at the interstitial dynamics of yet another extended family, a group of friends nursing consensual emotional traumas.

Denise O Hara makes her Cinema One Originals debut and her second feature with “Tayo Muna Habang Hindi Pa Tayo” a rom-com inversion with JC Santos and Jane Oineza, about the underside of trauma that even the truest of loves have.

Cinema One Originals has been producing breakthrough films with thought-provoking contents for the Filipino audience for 15 years. This year’s celebration will be held in line with the 100th anniversary of Philippine Cinema and the 25th anniversary of leading cable channel Cinema One.

 Opening Film: The Lighthouse

The tagline for the 15 th Cinema One Originals, Kaya Mo Ba?, translates to English as “Can you handle it?” referring to how Cinema One remains committed to push both film making and film watching, challenging filmmakers and audiences in evolving new ways not only of telling stories but new ways of watching films.

For this year’s Opening Film, Cinema One Originals has chosen a film that exemplifies this standard, a film marked by the uniqueness of its narrative form.

Robert Eggers’ debut The Witch was a legitimate surprise, and a touchstone in the current revival of what pundits are calling “elevated horror”. The Witch is a period horror film that was as much about religious hysteria as it was about the rational world being encroached by the irrational. His much-anticipated second film, The Lighthouse, which had its world premiere in no less than the Directors Fortnight at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, resumes his infatuation with a dark bygone past, and with the isolations that beset us. In this case, it’s two lighthouse keepers, slowly going insane on a jagged black rock, as something comes to claim them. But is it coming from without or from within?

World Cinema at Cinema Originals 2019

Opening the festival is the much-awaited and much-touted sophomore film from “The Witch” director Robert Eggers, “The Lighthouse”, which stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as lighthouse keepers slowly going insane on a black rock, and resumes Eggers’ fascination with bygone aesthetics tinged by a somber pulp surrealism.

Thematically kindred in many ways, Fernando Meirelles’ “The Two Popes”, about the often tenuous relationship between Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, is also about two men negotiating their estrangements.

Estrangement shadows two other films in the lineup, this time, estrangement between parent and offspring, with Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov’s tragicomic road movie “The Father”, which won the Crystal Globe at the 2019 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, centering on a father who takes a trip with his son after their neighbor claims his dead wife has been making phone calls from beyond the grave, while Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s follow-up to his Palme D’Or winning Shoplifters, and first feature outside his native Japan, The Truth, features Catherine Deneuve as a French movie star whose tumultuous relationship with her daughter gets even more fractious when her revealing memoir goes into publication.

Xavier Dolan’s present day “Matthias And Maxine” where two friends reconcile dormant and kindled feelings during a summer abroad, and Celine Sciamma’s period drama Portrait Of A Lady on Fire, which screened in competition at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and won both the Best Screenplay award as well as the Queer Palm, about a young painter who falls in love with her subject, may be generations apart in their settings, but both are incisive and poignant evocations of desire.

Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz’s describes his sprawling and expansive The Invisible Life of Eurice Gusmao, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and is based on Martha Batalha’s 2016 novel, as a tropical melodrama with all the emotional upheavals the descriptor suggests, while Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is an Agatha Christie riff that lovingly reconstructs it while cleverly deconstructing it and being fiendishly entertaining in the process.

 Closing Film: Dead Kids

This year’s Cinema One Originals closes with the latest film from one of the youngest and freshest voices in domestic cinema, Mikhail Red’s Dead Kids, which has recently been announced as the first domestic Netflix original, and more significantly, follows Eerie, his massively successful foray into inverting the girl school ghost story subgenre.
 
Dead Kids, which follows a group of entitled teenage misfits who visit their own skewed version of justice on the school jock who also happens to be a scion of a drug lord and whom they decide to kidnap for ransom, is a multiple genre inversion that throws the youth gone wild film into a room with teenage neo-noir and lets them have devilish fun with each other. Goes without saying that, in true noir ordinance, things don’t quite go as planned.

Sue Ramirez, Sue Ramirez, Khalil Ramos, Markus Paterson and Vance Larena star in Dead Kids.


Fresh, cool, vibrant, inclusive, brave, original. The 15th Cinema One Originals runs from November 7 to 17 at Trinoma, Glorietta, Ayala Manila Bay, Gateway, and Powerplant Makati. There will also be screenings at Vista Cinemas in Iloilo and Evia Lifestyle and in Cinema Centenario, Cinema ‘76, Black Maria, UP Cine Adarna, and FDCP Cinematheque Manila.