About Mondomanila

I have always wanted to explore Manila and its humanity. Not just its people, majority of whom are mired in poverty, but the whole rationale behind the irrational lives these people experience everyday.

There is the kind of human drama that extends beyond tragedy and plants its feet firmly in the territories of madness. In my film "Mondomanila," I strived to present the truth as gleaned from the cracks in the celluloid curtain. But the “truth,” it is not "out there," as pundits from the outer realm put it, but in one’s own backyard.
And backyards can shock, specially if one doesn't go out much. I believe that "Mondomanila" offers one of the most horrifying backyards in the tradition of films made by one of the foremost Filipino directors, the late Lino Brocka. If Brocka's films a decade ago talked about the wounds of Manila, I would like to believe that "Mondomanila" belongs to new breed of storytelling that makes one feel as if one has actually touched that wound, a close-up view of all that gangrene and pus.

"Mondomanila" takes place in the slums and is inhabited by the denizens of the underworld (the crippled pimp, the lonely housewife, the neighborhood gay and his macho father, the prostitutes, the smalltime politician, the Yankee pedophile).

"Mondomanila," however, is not about a celebration of self-destruction. Far from it. Decadence, after all, is the language of the privileged. Decadence is that which escapes from the clutches of bourgeois order. But what if there is no order at all? In "Mondomanila," there are no happy endings and Death awaits in ambush at every corner. However, in my film, Tragedy lies not at the end but is a given situation. It is, I believe, not the usual "story that needs to be told" but is, in all accounts, simply a backyard full of lovable fuckers.