Esoterica: Manila

Drawing from his personal adventures, film director, Elwood Perez veers away from standard-issue plot conventions in this paradoxically moral tale of a young man en route to becoming a creative artist.

Above the Clouds

A 15-year-old boy goes on a hiking trip with his estranged grandfather, and overcomes the grief of losing his parents on a mountain above the clouds.

Lorna

Lorna is sixty year old woman who is constantly searching for the right man, having failed at so many relationships. Having lived close to a lifetime alone, she decides to take another stab at moving on and more importantly, love.

Heaven's Judgment

An oppressed housemaid has transformed herself into a wealthy and powerful business mogul through sheer dint of talent, ambition and driving need to avenge herself on her tormentors.

Lafang

Loving You

Call center plays the center in this multi-level love stories. Call center staff - Tom and Lane - are best friends, but they are lovers in denial. Tom's bestfriend, Jepoi, is a call center instructor who is in love with a 40-year-old professor, Cyrill. Their May-December love affair is hampered by the dictates of a prejudiced society. Wannabe rockstar, the boyish chic Tonee, is clueless about the growing affection of Ryan, a fellow call center trainee. The group fashionista, Bry, is an aspiring model who unexpectedly found love with a cab driver, Axel.

T'yanak

T’yanak is the story of Julie’s adopted baby who transforms into a monster and terrorizes their quiet town of Putting Bato with a series of brutal murders, including the wife of townsman who gets wrongly imprisoned for T’yanak’s crime.

Pagnanasa

A young travelling salesman Rodel and a young innocent student Aleli. Aleli befriended a mature woman who is expert in love. The lady taught her and lured her to fantasize and to seek the love offered by men. Aleli became curious about the love that this lady is talking about and is out there to find love for herself until she dated Rodel who ended up raping her. After her painful encounter with Rodel, she got addicted to that sexual feeling and affection that he gave to her. This terrible experience made her to crave for more love from Rodel. Is her addiction with making love to Rodel going to stop or will it continue until she becomes a slave to it.

Mano Po III: My Love

Anti-crime crusader Lilia Chiong Yang seems to have everything a woman could want and need: a husband who pampers her; children whom any parent would be proud of; and the respect & admiration of the most powerful people in the land. But just as Lilia prepares for her 25th wedding anniversary celebration, a chance encounter in Thailand with her first love Michael throws Lilia's life into chaos. So begins the resumption of a relationship that threatens to unravel the delicate threads connecting Lilia to the other people in her life. - Written by regalfilms

Kristo

The Gospel of John is reimagined as a Filipino pasyon tale.

Colorum

After spending thirty years in prison, Pedro (Lou Veloso), aging and obviously clueless as to what has become of the world outside the penitentiary, is finally freed.

Sanglaan

Follows the lives of four different people, each linked to the other by the house of business. Olivia, owner of the establishment, yearns for her late husband and denies the onset of old age. She lives with her appraiser Amy, a romantic who is doing almost everything for love. Kanor serves as the pawnshop security guard. He holds Olivia in high esteem for letting him and his wife stay in the apartment above the shop. Kanor opens his house to boarder David, a seaman in transit.

ICU Bed #7

Lolo Joseph, the stubborn and loud-mouthed patriarch, whose illness tears his two daughters Cely and Beth to make a decision whether to end or prolong his life.

The Last Day of the Week

Ang Huling Araw ng Linggo spans a week in a life of seven individuals with interconnected narratives.

Maid

Nelia leaves her poor town to work as a maid in the city. Perceived as a lower-class citizen, Nelia gets harsh treatment that she does not deserve from her employer. She toils day and night to fulfill the wishes of her family at the expense of working herself to death. Ultimately, it is also in the city where she discovers an opportunity to move to a better life in the arms of a lover.

The Witness

The Witness tells the story about the girl "Angel Williams" who is having nightmares about a boy who is commiting suicide. One day Angel is invited by her family to a dinner in their house because Angel is quite busy so she missed their family reunions. A unknown man appears on the house and killed her guards,maids,sister,mother and father. Leaving her as "The Witness".When she manage to escape while the killer is finding her,she was shot into her back. She survived and she must investigate the happenings several years ago.

As He Sleeps

In sickness and in health, should marriage really be an unconditional partnership that should never be broken? Christina, in her 30's, is married to Hector, a husband who's paralyzed and therefore physically incompetent to consummate their marriage. She wants to liberate herself from a sexless union. Her needs as a woman are unfulfilled. But her love for Hector, and her commitment to him coupled with the dictates of her faith and marital vows, and her sympathy and care for her husband keeps her in "cage of marriage," where she suffers in melancholic solitude, yet contemplates on freedom and rediscovering her true worth. - Written by Lilit Reyes

Burlesk Queen Ngayon

Her name is Angela and she’s a woman of the world. Daring and defiant, she works as a stripper in a night club to support her family. Her work, she thinks, has made her indiffirent to love. But the day comes when she meets the guy who makes her frigid heart beat again.

Ilusyon

Set in Philippine post-American colonialist era, where the American influence was still apparent, Ilusyon tells the story of Miguel, a young man from the countryside, who decides to visit his father, Pablo, a Modernist painter in Manila. Upon his arrival, he discovers that his father has decided to leave for the province but he opted to stay in Manila for a vacation. One day, he meets Stella, a nude model originally scheduled to pose for Miguel's father. Struck by her beauty, Miguel does the unthinkable - he pretends to be his father the painter. Developing a relationship based on a lie, things turn for the worse as Stella begets a strange skin disease that turns off Miguel. Surrounded by strange characters - a talking cow, a talkative mailman and a nosy landlady - Miguel is driven into a frenzy realization about beauty, lust, love and being true to oneself. An ambiguous ending underlines the surreal tone of the film.

Concerto

Concerto is about how, in the last part of World War II, a special piano concert is held in the forest outside Davao City, in Mindanao. In these boondocks, a displaced Filipino family, lead by Military Commander Ricardo and his wife Julia, become acquainted with a group of Japanese officers, similarly camped nearby. Their son Joselito, a Japanese speaker, becomes the conduit with the neighboring Japanese. Their daughters Niña, an aspiring concert pianist and the musically gifted, Maria, who is able to play by ear, are alternately repulsed and intrigued by the officers. Family values are questioned as the family treads the thin line between enmity and friendship with the occupying Japanese. Based on true stories from the director's own family history, Concerto celebrates a family whose reverence for life, expressed through their love of music and friendship, can survive even war, and shows how beauty and compassion does grow in even the harshest of conditions. - Written by anonymous

Lighting Up the Stars

Having been released after serving his sentence, a funeral director accidentally crosses paths with a girl which brings about an unexpected change in his attitude towards life.

Finally Dawn

A young Roman woman during the 1950s is on the verge of becoming engaged to a man. She goes to Cinecittà to do an audition as an extra and is thrust into this almost infinite night during which she discovers herself.

About Dry Grasses

A young art teacher hopes to be transferred to Istanbul after completing his mandatory duty in a remote village school in Anatolia. After accusations of inappropriate contact with a student surface, his hopes of escape fade and he descends further into an existential crisis.

For My Country

Aissa, a young officer of Algerian origin, tragically loses his life during a fresher initiation ritual at the prestigious French military academy of Saint-Cyr. As the death tears through his family, controversy arises over Aissa’s funeral plans when the Army refuses to take responsibility. Ismael, his older, rebellious brother, tries to keep the family united as they fight to win justice for Aissa.

Promises

Clémence, the fearless mayor of a town near Paris, is completing the final term of her political career. With her faithful right-hand man Yazid, she has long fought for this town plagued by inequality, unemployment and slumlords. However, when Clémence is approached to become Minister, her ambition arises, questioning her devotion and commitment to her citizens. Will her political integrity and election promises survive her newly found ambition?

Diary ng Panget

A young woman takes a job as a personal maid for a rich young man. The pair do not get along, but soon due to their classmates' games of love, their relationship grows more complicated than before.

Heaven Will Wait

Mélanie, 16 years old, lives with her mother. She likes going to school, her friends, playing the cello, and she wants to change the world. But when she meets a boy on the Internet and falls in love with him, her world changes as she is gradually recruited by Daesh. Sonia is 17 years old, and she almost did something irrevocable to “guarantee” her family a place in paradise. These teenage girls might be called Anaïs, Manon or Leila, and one day they all might go some way down the recruitment process. But can they ever come back from it?

Everything's Gonna Be Alright

Bruno Salvati is a director of little success, fresh from the separation from his wife Anna with whom he had two children, the twenty-year-old Adele and the seventeen-year-old Tito. Following a sudden illness, Bruno is diagnosed with a disease that requires the intervention of a donor. All his family relationships are called into question, including that with his father Umberto, the custodian of a secret that will force Bruno to embark on a journey in search of someone who can help him.

Night of the Kings

A young man is sent to "La Maca," a prison in the middle of the Ivorian forest ruled by its inmates. As tradition goes with the rising of the red moon, he is designated by the Boss to be the new "Roman" and must tell a story to the other prisoners. Learning what fate awaits him, he begins to narrate the mystical life of the legendary outlaw named "Zama King" and has no choice but to make his story last until dawn.

Loro 2

"Loro", in two parts, is a period movie that chronicles, as a fiction story, events likely happened in Italy (or even made up) between 2006 and 2010. "Loro" wants to suggest in portraits and glimps, through a composite constellation of characters, a moment in history, now definitively ended, which can be described in a very summary picture of the events as amoral, decadent but extraordinarily alive. Additionally, "Loro" wishes to tell the story of some Italians, fresh and ancient people at the same time: souls from a modern imaginary Purgatory who, moved by heterogeneous intents like ambition, admiration, affection, curiosity, personal interests, establish to try and orbit around the walking Paradise that is the man named Silvio Berlusconi.

Antigone

Sophie Deraspe’s adaptation of the classic Greek tragedy of the same name reimagines the story of a woman’s quest for justice as a commentary on the immigrant experience in contemporary Montreal.

Ceasefire

In the early 1920s, Georges Laffont, traumatized by the horrific trench warfare, decides to leave his life behind and travel to West Africa. In the vast territories of Upper Volta he - with the help of Diofo, artist and also survivor of the Great War - try to recruit the villagers as labor for plantations in Ghana. But his adventure leads him to a dead-end, and he comes back to Paris desperate to find his place in the world.

Once in a Lifetime

At Léon Blum High School in Créteil, France, a history teacher decides to have her weakest 10th grade class participate in a national history competition.

Glory

When Tsanko Petrov, a railroad worker, finds millions of lev on the train tracks, he decides to turn the entire amount over to the police. Grateful, the state rewards him with a new wristwatch… which soon stops working. Meanwhile, Julia Staikova, the head of PR for the Ministry of Transport, loses his old watch. Here starts Petrov’s desperate struggle to get back not only his old watch, but his dignity.

The Reunion

A film between fiction and reality, highlighting questions about group dynamics and established hierarchies. A group of people meet for their high school reunion 20 years later. One of them talks about her being bullied and outcast and soon the former classmates fall back to the roles they used to have back in school. But this is just half of the film.

Bad Tales

In a small suburb on the outskirts of Rome, the cheerful heat of summer camouflages a stifling atmosphere of alienation. From a distance, the families seem normal, but it’s an illusion: in the houses, courtyards and gardens, silence shrouds the subtle sadism of the fathers, the passivity of the mothers and the guilty indifference of adults. But it’s the desperation and repressed rage of the children that will explode and cut through this grotesque façade, with devastating consequences for the entire community.

Inseparables

Felipe a wealthy businessman who has been quadriplegic, due to an accident, is looking for a therapeutic assistant. There are several highly qualified, but he decides to take the assistant of his gardener, Tito who has decided to resign.

The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles

Josephine and Iris, sisters with opposite personalities, have their relationship radically transformed while working on a book.

In Bloom

Eka and Natia leave their childhood behind and ignore societal customs to escape from their turbulent family lives.

The Chosen Ones

Sofia, 14 years old, is in love with Ulises. Because of him, in spite of him, she is forced into a prostitution network in Mexico. To set her free, Ulises will have to find another girl to replace her. Adapted from Jorge Volpi’s novel, set in the world of juvenile prostitution.