Filmex

Told through the stories of five former prisoners, this is the story of political activists sent to the notorious Robben Island prison in the 1960s by the apartheid regime, who rise above their incarceration by creating a football league and finding an outlet for their passion and commitment to discipline through the Beautiful Game.

Through hard work, the Spaniard Alejandro has become wealthy and powerful. In contrast, the banker Don Victorino—who once refused a loan to the then-poor Alejandro—has fallen on difficult times. Victorino is married to Ana, who spends her life playing the piano, and they are the parents of the proud Julia, who is engaged to Enrique Régules. Julia is forced to marry Alejandro in order to save her family’s financial situation. Despite her husband’s blunt and often harsh honesty, Julia gradually finds herself falling in love with him, and vainly tries to make him jealous with Licenciado Héctor, who courts her. Julia becomes nervously ill, troubled by the fact that Alejandro does not love her in the romantic, storybook way she longs for.

The film tells the story of a former 1980’s film cameraman who now currently works as a movie pirate operating in present day Manila. He routinely smuggles a digital camcorder into movie theaters in order to illegally record films. One night he records something else... And the footage goes viral.

In a typical playground, life plays a game of irony when two 8-year old kids are on a seesaw. One is a rather hefty child from a well-to-do family who is stuck at the bottom, whereas a lanky child brought up in poverty is on top. Rich kid is looking up to the poor boy, who in turn, is looking down on him. How will the rich kid reverse their positions? The answer to that question will make one realize that friendship is more valuable than money, while the other will discover his true worth as a friend.

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”.