The MindaNews Podcast MindaNews

The term regional cinema was coined, or became a wave in the landscape of Philippine cinema, with the inception of the Cinema Rehiyon, an annual exhibition and gathering of regional cinemas and filmmakers all over the Philippines, led by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). It has always identified films with a certain rootedness to place, culture, language, and local realities where it came from, whether the filmmaker comes from a province, town or city, or speaks a regional language. 
While this sense of belonging to a region or ethnolinguistic group remains to be true for most of the films that continue to come out from the regions, regional cinema’s usual preoccupation with place-rootedness is coming to terms with the realities of migration and globalization. How does ‘regionality’ or a distinct regional ‘sensibility’ emanate from a ‘transregional’ film, for instance? Where does its rootedness take place? 
For filmmakers who have moved places, and are moving in and out of regional–even national–borders, living outside the immediate realities of their hometowns, defining and engaging with a regional cinema and one’s identity as a regional filmmaker becomes challenging–a theorizing that should also be grounded in the conditions of filmmaking in the regions, the opportunities, or lack of it, that shape the practice.
This Minda Salida podcast discussed Filipino films–two 2023 Cinemalaya narrative films and one 2012 documentary film–that depict the liminality of the regional space with characters arriving and departing, leaving and coming home. 
In Gitling directed by Jopy Arnaldo, a Bacolod-born translator and Japanese filmmaker meet in Bacolod at an international film festival, where the latter is premiering his film. And yet, it isn’t much about Bacolod as a place, or the Chicken Inasal that the two ate together, but more about the mechanics of translation, and the possibilities offered by it, paralleled by the potentiality of romance from chance encounters. 
Meanwhile, Ryan Machado’s Huling Palabas depicts a provincial upbringing in the town of Looc, Romblon, where a movie-obsessed and fatherless teenager and his best friend come of age in the midst of a waning VHS era. The film is also an exploration of queer identity, and how folklore, fiction, and migration shape our way into the world. It presents the region as a locus of departures and arrivals, of the push and pull of the old and new.
 In Sherbien Dacalanio’s Ang Pagbabalik ng Bituin, a Mindanao-born domestic helper working in Manila travels back and forth to her hometown in Cabadbaran, Agusan del Norte via the RORO bus bringing with her pirated DVDs and establishing a mini-movie house with her neighbors as patrons. As much as it is about the homecoming of the titular Estrella (star, in Spanish), this fascinating 2012 documentary, which was part of the Daang Dokyu, opens up the discussion about film access and distribution.  
 The podcast ties up neatly the themes discussed in the films into a narrative that is also about movies and watching movies as a collective experience.
This podcast is completed under the author’s Arts Equator Fellowship. The views expressed are solely of the author.

Special thanks:
Rap Meting of TimeWRAP Films
Executive Producer: Yas D. Ocampo
MindaNews Editor-in-Chief: Bobby Timonera
Hosts, Minda Salida: Jay Rosas and John Bengan

Gitling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eILaN4P6kRc
Huling Palabas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flz260WfCaw
Ang Pagbabalik ng Bituin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZZ4YVYSnig

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In December last year, just before Christmas, at the rooftop bar of Suazo in Davao, film critic Jay Rosas sat down and recorded a podcast with two of the most promising Davao filmmakers: Conrad dela Cruz and Joshua Cesar ‘Wowa’ Medroso, who started their current filmmaking path almost the same time, when their short films competed at the 17th Mindanao Film Festival in 2019.
Medroso made ⁠Trabungko⁠, a fantasy retelling of the myth of his birthplace Tibungco, a district located in the outskirts of Davao City, while Dela Cruz’s entry is Bootleg, about two DVD pirates who succumbs into the world of drug dealing with the waning profitability of their trade. Both films are wildly different from each other, but they depict a contemporary Davao in all its gritty realism and as a myth-filled landscape, while cognizant of a Mindanao storytelling consciousness.
Following Bootleg, Dela Cruz made two shorts: Living Dead and Dead in the Dark during the pandemic, which looks like they exist in the same microcosmic universe—a nondescript interior of a house—saturated with a neon-soaked bloodbath. Dead in the Dark won best short film at the 8th edition of Ngilngig Asian Fantastic Film Festival, with the jury citing its fantastical tale of the macabre that speaks of our contemporary history of violence. 
In his sophomore short, Kumbiyor (The Conveyor Belt), Medroso was able to make use of his place’s remoteness, its existence between the urban and rural spaces of the city, as a futuristic landscape gripped by a zombie apocalypse. He followed it up by ‘Tong Adlaw Nga Nag-Snow sa Pinas (The Day it Snowed in the Philippines), about two boys obsessed with snow and Samurai movies, that also works as a commentary on latent violence in the form of child abuse.  A complete turnaround from his mid-length sophomore film, the film’s runtime is a mere five minutes, a requirement of the Sine Kabataan film lab. Nonetheless, the brevity showcased his skill at storytelling restraint, and proved successful as it competed as one of the 10 entries in Cinemalaya’s short film category last year.
Medroso continues his Cinemalaya streak with his first feature-length film Kantil, produced with funding under the festival. It will be a science-fiction queer story featuring two boys, that feels like a continuation of his Sine Kabataan short, and will still be set in his birthplace Tibungco, particularly in the coastal slums. Meanwhile, Dela Cruz says that he would like to “commit more mistakes” with short films before embarking on a full-length film, planning to complete a trilogy of horror shorts that starts from his recent Ritwal, which won for him a Best Director trophy at last year’s MFF.
In this podcast, Minda Salida talks to Wowa and Conrad about their films, influences, filmmaking process, appreciating each other’s works as well as their contemporaries, and their insights on Mindanao regional cinema.

Note: This essay was completed under the author’s Arts Equator Fellowship. Views expressed are solely of the writer.

Special thanks:
Paolo Papica of Suazo Bar, Balik Bukid, Liz Manabat, Brendel Zarate.

Executive Producer: Yas D. Ocampo
MindaNews Editor-in-Chief: Bobby Timonera
Hosts, Minda Salida: Jay Rosas and John Bengan

Lifting Local #1: Olive Puentespina, cheesemaker and innovator (1st of 2 parts)
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5rHaJWIoEDWbVUAqmY3V6v?si=fbQdeyGGQfar7Qt3-O4--w

The arguments against Waste to Energy: Interview with No Burn Pilipinas and IDIS
https://open.spotify.com/episode/43XHmltOIkAK8bxm5D5nlJ?si=39f8869e610b4d61

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In this first episode of the Lifting Local Podcast, we feature Olive Puentespina of Malagos Farmhouse Cheese, an icon of Davao culinary specialties. This business, along with other endeavors they have such as Malagos Chocolate and Davao Thermo Biotec Corporation, are truly some of the most impactful local businesses in Davao and Mindanao.

Executive Producer: Yas D. Ocampo
Host: Liezl Salera-Manabat

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The Pilot Episode features MindaNews editors Bobby Timonera and Boy Mordeno and social media manager Yas D. Ocampo talking about their adventures in running. 🏃‍♂️

Executive Producer: Yas D. Ocampo
Art by Keith Bacongco


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During the 2022 Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival—a Filipino film festival still largely Manila-centric—four films tackled Mindanao in their narratives, whether as a central subject and setting, or tangentially, with the 2017 Marawi Siege in the background. The production of these films followed the tradition of film production that dates back to Marilou Diaz Abaya’s Bagong Buwan (New Moon) made in 2001 up to 2019 with the release of Brillante Mendoza’s Mindanao. Similar Cinemalaya film productions in the previous years have also featured the Mindanao subject in their narratives. 

This podcast conversation examines how each film imagined the idea of Mindanao, particularly its image as a perpetually-mined site for narratives of war and conflict, preoccupying the consciousness of filmmakers away from the region. While admittedly non-Mindanao filmmakers face certain challenges and production limitations, this preoccupation is a point of interest that is worthy of probing into particularly how these filmmakers negotiate with the historical, social, and psychological dimension of the unrest in Mindanao into the narratives of their films, which cover decades-long conflicts and the very recent threats of terrorism. 

The films discussed are: The Baseball Player by Carlo Obispo, set during the 2000 all-out war of the Philippine government against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF); Angkas (Backride) by Rain Yamson, a road-trip buddy movie on habal-habal which touches on the communist insurgency, supposedly set in Mt. Diwalwal; 12 Weeks by Anna Isabelle Matutina, about NGO worker Alice who is faced with a life-changing decision after an unwanted pregnancy; and Bula sa Langit (Triggered), which is about a returning soldier fresh from the Marawi Siege faced with trauma and the difficulties of regaining normalcy from the experience of war.

The lack of accessibility to these films is also pointed out, even with the current trend of streaming services acquiring indie film titles to diversify their film catalog. These films were only shown during a limited local run at the Cinematheque Davao but also did not draw in a considerable number of audience with the limited promotions in social media. 

Minda Salida hosts Jay Rosas and John Bengan look back at the three-year gap of the podcast to give a brief snapshot of the Philippine and regional film scene, particularly in the post-pandemic context with film productions and film-related events like festivals slowly returning to normal. 

There is also an observed lack of full-length film outputs from Mindanao filmmakers since productions and activities returned to normal. However, new filmmaking voices continue to emerge as short films still reign in regional film festivals. Lastly, Rosas shares that two upcoming first full-length feature films from Davao filmmakers will soon go into production like Wowa Medroso’s Kantil (a Cinemalaya 2024 film) and Jarell Serencio’s The Boy and Flight of Spiders (which won a grant during the last QCinema International Film Festival), aside from upcoming full-length films from Teng Mangansakan and Bagane Fiola. 

This Minda Salida podcast, completed under the Arts Equator fellowship, was produced in partnership with MindaNews and the first episode after three years since it was launched in 2020. (Listen to the previous ten episodes on Spotify here.)

Hosts: Jay Rosas and John Bengan
Special thanks: AVL, Bagane Fiola, Melona Mascariñas, Anj Estrella, Rap Meting, Bobby Timonera, Carolyn Arguillas

Audio editor: Alexis Rafael Delola

Executive Producer: Yas D. Ocampo

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In this first music edition of the MindaNews Podcast, Yano co-founder and guitarist Eric Gancio shares with journalist Yas D. Ocampo the ups and downs of iconic Filipino rock icon Yano. Gancio discusses the band's beginnings, their rise to fame in the 1990s, and their continued influence on Filipino music.
This podcast episode is brought to you in partnership with Holodeck Productions, Cinedashery East, and Alberto's Pizza.

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