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. 

Venues

Fresh, cool, vibrant, inclusive, brave, original. The 15th Cinema One Originals runs from November 7 to 17 at the following cinemas:

• Trinoma
• Glorietta
• Ayala Manila Bay
• Gateway
• Powerplant Makati
• Vista Cinemas Iloilo
• Evia Lifestyle Center
• Cinema Centenario
• Cinema ‘76
• Black Maria
• UP Cine Adarna
• FDCP Cinematheque Manila

Screening Schedules

Ticket Prices / Passes Info

Regular ticket prices vary in different cinema venues.

Festival passes are available through KTX at https://ktx.abs-cbn.com/events/21845/premium-pass-cinema-one-originals-film-festival-2019.

Premium Pass – ₱810 (₱162/film)

Valid on November 8-17 at the following venues: 
Trinoma | Glorietta | Ayala Malls Manila Bay | Powerplant Makati

The Premium Pass entitles you to watch ANY FIVE (5) FILMS featured in the festival.

• THIS IS NOT YOUR OFFICIAL CINEMA TICKET. Please present your purchased pass from KTX at the cinema booth of your preferred partner theater.

• You may only use your pass the next day after your purchase. You will receive an SMS notification once your tickets have been activated.

• You must nominate your desired 5 films upon purchase. You can change this up to 1 day before your desired screening schedule by calling 415-2272 dial 9. 

• SEATS ARE AT A FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED BASIS. The management cannot guarantee your seat if the screening time is already sold out before you arrive at the cinema.

Nominate your 5 desired films upon checkout. You can change this up to 1 day before your new desired screening schedule. You may only use your pass the next day after your purchase. An SMS notification will be sent once your tickets have been activated.

Origs Pass – ₱1,040 (₱130/film)

Valid on November 8-17 at the following venues: 
 Trinoma | Glorietta | Ayala Malls Manila Bay | Powerplant Makati

The Origs Pass entitles you to watch ALL 8 FULL-LENGTH COMPETITION FILMS.

• THIS IS NOT YOUR OFFICIAL CINEMA TICKET. Please present your purchased pass from KTX at the cinema booth of your preferred partner theater.

• You may only use your pass the next day after your purchase. You will receive an SMS notification once your tickets have been activated.

• You may watch one screening per film only.

• SEATS ARE AT A FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED BASIS. The management cannot guarantee your seat if the screening time is already sold out before you arrive at the cinema.

You may only use your pass the next day after your purchase. You will receive an SMS notification once your tickets have been activated.

FESTIVAL PASS – ₱3,150 (₱85/film)

The Festival Pass entitles you to watch ALL 37 FILMS featured in the festival except special screenings / non-ticketed events.

• THIS IS NOT YOUR OFFICIAL CINEMA TICKET. Please present your purchased pass from KTX at the cinema booth of your preferred partner theater.

• You may only use your pass the next day after your purchase. You will receive an SMS notification once your tickets have been activated.

• You may watch one screening per film only.

• SEATS ARE AT A FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED BASIS. The management cannot guarantee your seat if the screening time is already sold out before you arrive at the cinema.

You may only use your pass the next day after your purchase. You will receive an SMS notification once your tickets have been activated.

Eight Original Narrative Features

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. 

For updates, visit @CinemaOneOriginals on Facebook, @c1origs on Twitter and @c1originals on Instagram. #C1Originals #IAmOriginal

CINEMA ONE COMPETITION 1:  LUCID

Victor Villanueva, who made his debut in the seventh year of Cinema One Originals with the quirky comedy My Paranormal Romance and is also known for the breakout favorite Patay Na Si Hesus, is directing Lucid from a screenplay by newcomer Natts Jadaone, which is about the phenomenon of lucid dreaming but slanted at an angle where it attains a supernatural agency.

Alessandra De Rossi plays a young woman who leads a lonely, mundane existence in the real world but who has the perfect life in her lucid dreams which she can somehow control, meets a mysterious stranger, played by JM De Guzman, who challenges her to turn her dream life into something a bit more adventurous. Then her dreams become more real than her reality and the line between the two starts to blur.

“It’s a bittersweet movie about the pain of longing, and also of self-empowerment, and it’s new territory for me, the way it switches between bleak and whimsical, meditative to the bizarre. It’s about the clashing of the waking life and the dreamlife, but in a modern Filipino context, escaping the clutter of everyday emptiness. In a world of self-doubt and confusion, do we awaken or stay asleep?” The man of your dreams is on his way but only in your dreams. Kaya mo?  

Lucid premieres on November 10, 7:30 PM at Trinoma. 

CINEMA ONE COMPETITION 2:  METAMORPHOSIS

“There are few films about intersexuality.” First time filmmaker J.E Tiglao articulates why it was necessary for him to write the screenplay for Metamorphosis.  “Statistically, one out of 2000 is born an intersexual, Most of them are in hiding because of the stigma that’s been attached to their unconventional anatomies. There are very few support systems, and scientific aid is even more scarce. We need to tell their story. You need to know their story.”

Born with both male and female genitals, but raised like a boy by his conservative family, Adam goes through all the things prepubescent boys go through, including a fascination with strange animals he takes for pets and being smitten by a lovely girl.  His bucolic world turns upside down when he gets his first menstrual period setting him off on a journey that tests the spiritual and physical limits of sexual identity and into a new world of ambiguity and desire.

The only choice you don’t have is the one you chose. Kaya mo?

Gold Aceron, Iana Bernardez, Ivan Padilla, Ricky Davao and Yayo Aguila star in Metamorphosis which premieres on November 10, 5 PM at Trinoma. 

CINEMA ONE COMPETITION 3: O 

This black comedy, in which necrophiliac vampires run funeral parlors to collect blood from corpses which they process into red meth that they sell to their kind, dives deep into the pit of  vampire drug culture and the lengths the undead will go for a fix. “It’s about vampires and a romcom with a love triangle, or a love square in our case” O centers on a funeral parlor intern and closet necrophiliac who starts pushing blood after she meets a vampire drug lord whose sister she falls in love with, complicating matters even more than they already are. 

 “O is an exercise in giving the most clichéd concepts and genres a new flavor,” Kevin Dayrit, who made his feature film debut in the eighth year of Cinema One Originals with the multi-awarded Catnip, cheekily says as way of describing his new film, “It’s the same old hotdog, just dipped in peanut butter. It tastes offensive but funny at the same time.”

Kagatin o Mabitin? Pati dugo mo, hihingin, Kaya Mo?!

Anna Luna, Sarah Carlos, Lauren Young and Jasmine Curtis-Smith headline O which premieres on November 8,10 PM at Trinoma.

CINEMA ONE COMPETITION 4: SILA SILA 

Sila Sila is essentially an LGBT ghost story, or more specifically an LGBT ghosting story, in which a young man whose breakups tend to be messy and have severe and traumatic repercussions finds himself not only confronting the people on the receiving end of those breakups but navigating feelings he had thought long gone but are now suddenly rekindled.

“What does it mean to ghost someone? To be gone and still be there. How does one capture that presence, that energy, that feeling? That darkness, that lightness?” Giancarlo Abrahan, who directed the 2017 Cinema One Originals Best Picture winner Paki and is returning this year, poses these provocative questions as a way into his new film, which is another take on group dynamics, focusing this time on an estranged group of friends and the feelings that linger long after the friendship has drifted apart.

“Ghosting—this modern horror—does not really deal with a scary event or a monstrous being. But it still deals with fear. A fear that feels and sounds sad and funny at the same time. Although it isn’t exactly friendly ghosting. This ghosting still inflicts pain. It can be deliberate or unintentional, visible or unseen, deeply felt or numbing. This pain has its own form of violence. It is that violence that I am interested in. And that is what the film tries to capture.”

What if the one that let you get away comes back? Kaya mo?

Gio Gahol and Topher Fabregas star in Sila Sila which premieres on November 8, 7:30 PM at Trinoma.

CINEMA ONE COMPETITION 5:  TAYO MUNA HABANG HINDI PA TAYO

A soft boy. A strong girl. Tayo Muna Habang Hindi Pa Tayo is a love story that comes close but not far enough.   “Why are there so many love stories?  Because it feels good to watch how two people out of billions find each other and connect.”  Denise O Hara, who made her debut last year with the acclaimed Mamang moves to a different genre for her sophomore feature which, despite her seeming optimism, is a love story grounded by anxiety and uncertainty. “It’s all about that moment when one says “I love you” and all the assumptions, repercussions and yes, even traumas that those words carry.”

When the one you love is the one you can’t have. Kaya mo?

Tayo Muna Habang Hindi Pa Tayo stars JC Santos and Jane Oineza and premieres on Nov. 9, 7:30pm at Trinoma. 

CINEMA ONE COMPETITION 6: TIA MADRE

Tia Madre is a horror story told through the eyes of a child: a clingy, hyper-imaginative and slightly twisted 10-year old girl named Camille whose mother Emilia inexplicably changes into something else, something more sinister, something more violent, something more distant, something that isn’t her mother anymore and quite possibly isn’t human. 

“I want to make people see and understand that not all people’s childhoods have blue skies with rainbows; and mostly for other people, it’s like a raging storm that never left.” Debuting filmmaker Eve Baswel elaborates on how much her film draws from the slightly darker side of her own childhood. “The panic of forgetting to water the plants in fear of a yantok hitting your legs, the discomfort of having to drink water all day at school because you have nothing to eat, the humiliation of coming to school every day wearing the same unwashed uniform for the past three days. I only get to tell this story once, and I want it to be sad, sorrowful, heartbreaking and horrifying.”

TFW your mother’s scares you more than any ghost. Kaya mo?

Cherie Gil and Jana Agoncillo star in Tia Madre, which premieres on November 9, 5PM at Trinoma.

CINEMA ONE COMPETITION 7:  UTOPIA

Wrong place, wrong time. This is the fundamental itinerary of any noir. The throwing in of disparate lives into a chaos of circumstance. A freelance videographer, a rookie police office, an undercover PDEA agent, and a crime in progress. Only tonight, a comet flies over Manila and the cosmic disturbances turns everything on its head for one night. Everything that could go wrong suddenly foes right. 

“Ask any Filipino these days and they’ll tell you that utopia, a perfect world, simply means a world where justice exists.” Dustin Celestino breaks down the title of his debut feature and essentially breaks down its core. “The unjust suffer and the just are unscathed. The police don’t plant drugs on suspects, and follow due-process. Criminals kill each other without collateral damage.  A world unlike ours. I hope the film forces people to contemplate our collective destiny as a nation.”

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong unless a comet passes through the sky. Kaya mo?

Enzo Pineda, Vin Abrenica, Aaron Villaflor star in Utopia which premieres on November 9, 10 PM at Gateway. 

CINEMA ONE COMPETITION 8:  YOURS TRULY, SHIRLEY

Yours Truly, Shirley marks the return of Regine Velasquez to the big screen playing the eponymous widow of the title who hasn’t quite moved on from the untimely death of her husband in a motorcycle accident and her grief is making her do funny things, like imagining the newest pop sensation sweeping the country is the reincarnation of her dead husband. But is it really all in her head? And just how far will she go to prove it isn’t?

“Is there a right response to loss? A proper way to mourn?” These are ultimately the questions Nigel Santos tries to answer in his debut feature, a poignant, funny and ultimately life-affirming exploration on the often complicated and delicate conditions of surrender necessary to move on from the death of a loved one and how those left behind are often fighting for their lives, too. “Letting go doesn’t always have to mean a sad farewell.” 

What happens when your dead husband is reincarnated in the body of a young pop star? Kaya mo?

Yours Truly Shirley co-stars Denise Padilla and Rayt Carreon. It premieres on November 10, 9:45 PM at Trinoma. 

Opening Film

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?

Variety calls it , “a gripping and turbulent drama”  which the Guardian echoes, saying it is “explosively scary and captivatingly beautiful” and praising the “sledgehammer punch” of the performances from the film’s two lone stars, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson.

The Lighthouse screens on November 7, 7 pm at the Ayala Mall Manila Bay Cinema 7.

Closing Film

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, which screens on November 17 at Gateway Cinema 5 at 9:50 pm.

World Cinema

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.

Restored Classics

This year, the Restored Classics roster includes the painstaking restoration works from ABS-CBN Film Restoration and FPJ Studios. Part of the line-up are Eddie Romero’s multi-generational epic “Aguila” in which Fernando Poe Jr. breaks his own mold for possibly the first and last time, Mario O’Hara’s gritty quasi-noir “Bulaklak Sa City Jail” one of his most distinctive collaborations with Nora Aunor,  Abbo De La Cruz’s  unflinching tale of greed “Misteryo Sa Tuwa”, two experimental postmodern comedies Peque Gallaga’s  “Bad Bananas Sa Putting Tabing” and Ishmael Bernal’s “Tisoy”, and two of Carlitos Suigon-Reyna’s fastidious, flamboyant melodramas “Hihintayin Kita Sa Langit” and “Saan Ka Man Naroroon.”

RESTORED CLASSICS: AGUILA (Eddie Romero)

On its 15^th year, Cinema One Originals is all about the Cinema One Originals Experience and how it can both be a challenge and a measure of an audience’s threshold for original and adventurous cinema exemplified by the tagline “I Am Original. Kaya mo?” 

For all its forward-looking thrust, this year’s Cinema One Originals is all about celebrating the past, too, with Cinema One’s Restored Classics, which is more than just a showcase for nostalgia but is more a recognition of how pushing the form is a state of constant flux and how today’s classics were yesterday’s form-pushers, innovators and daring, adventurous originals, too. 

Fernando Poe Jr. has let his action hero iconicity play into more serious, more nuanced portrayals before, notably in films like Celso Ad Castillo’s Asedillo and Lino Brocka’s Santiago, but where you can call them re-inventions, they stayed firmly within the parameters of the genres he’s built his icon on. His  work in Eddie Romero’s sprawling time-jumping historical epic Aguila has the sole distinction of stripping him of his iconicity, not merely straying  from his comfort zones but abandoning them entirely , as his eponymous character arcs through history and across generations, while Poe himself, the actor and the action star, pushes against his own mythology and eventually breaks his own mold.  Like with any massive period piece, the so-called star-studded supporting cast is a must and here we have  everyone from then-young turks Christopher De Leon and Jay Ilagan and Johnny Delgado and Charo Santos and Sandy Andolong and Chanda Romero to stalwart titans Eddie Garcia and Amalia Fuentes and Celia Rodriguez. But Aguila is ultimately more notable for being the first and only collaboration between these two national artists. 

RESTORED CLASSICS: BAD BANANAS SA PUTING TABING (Peque Gallaga)

On its 15^th year, Cinema One Originals is all about the Cinema One Originals Experience and how it can both be a challenge and a measure of an audience’s threshold for original and adventurous cinema exemplified by the tagline “I Am Original. Kaya mo?” 

For all its forward-looking thrust, this year’s Cinema One Originals is all about celebrating the past, too, with Cinema One’s Restored Classics, which is more than just a showcase for nostalgia but is more a recognition of how pushing the form is a state of constant flux and how today’s classics were yesterday’s form-pushers, innovators and daring, adventurous originals, too. 

Coming off the colossal success of his somber, sprawling period piece Oro Plata Mata, Peque Gallaga took a rather severe, and rather ballsy, left turn for his follow-up film,  putting what was then one of the most successful and high profile comedy ensembles through the quasi-surrealist paces of what could best be boiled down to as a screwball adventure about buried treasure that takes Christopher De Leon, Jay Ilagan, Edgar Mortiz and Johnny Delgado from the dive spots in the Hundred Islands to the mean streets of Mexico and earns its reputation as a film ahead of its time.

RESTORED CLASSICS: BULAKLAK SA CITY JAIL (Mario O Hara)

On its 15^th year, Cinema One Originals is all about the Cinema One Originals Experience and how it can both be a challenge and a measure of an audience’s threshold for original and adventurous cinema exemplified by the tagline “I Am Original. Kaya mo?” 

For all its forward-looking thrust, this year’s Cinema One Originals is all about celebrating the past, too, with Cinema One’s Restored Classics, which is more than just a showcase for nostalgia but is more a recognition of how pushing the form is a state of constant flux and how today’s classics were yesterday’s form-pushers, innovators and daring, adventurous originals, too. 

It’s hard to dispute the notion that one of the most potent director-actress collaborations in Philippine cinema has to be the films Nora Aunor made with Mario O’ Hara, nearly every single one of which is a classic. “Bulaklak Ng City Jail”, featuring one of the most formidable ensemble supporting casts in the history of Philippine cinema (Perla Bautista, Celia Rodriguez. Mitch Valdes), and which is arguably their most iconic. A quasi-noir melodrama in which a nightclub singer, played by Aunor, is thrown in jail for the frustrated murder of her lover’s wife, finding herself thrown into a dangerous world beyond her grasp that she must now transcend and escape.

RESTORED CLASSICS: HIHINTAYIN KITA SA LANGIT (Carlitos Siguion Reyna)

On its 15^th year, Cinema One Originals is all about the Cinema One Originals Experience and how it can both be a challenge and a measure of an audience’s threshold for original and adventurous cinema exemplified by the tagline “I Am Original. Kaya mo?” 

For all its forward-looking thrust, this year’s Cinema One Originals is all about celebrating the past, too, with Cinema One’s Restored Classics, which is more than just a showcase for nostalgia but is more a recognition of how pushing the form is a state of constant flux and how today’s classics were yesterday’s form-pushers, innovators and daring, adventurous originals, too. 

When Carlitos Siguion Reyna’s breakout film Hihintayin Kita Sa Langit was released in 1991, transposing and updating Emily Brontë’s classic Wuthering Heights to the time-stopping, and heart-stopping grandeur of Batanes, with Richard Gomez and Dawn Zulueta to smolder through as the film’s iteration of Heathcliff and Catherine, it signaled the arrival of a distinct new cinematic voice, serious-minded and fastidious yet brazen and sensual. 

RESTORED CLASSICS: MISTERYO SA TUWA  (Abbo De La Cruz)

On its 15^th year, Cinema One Originals is all about the Cinema One Originals Experience and how it can both be a challenge and a measure of an audience’s threshold for original and adventurous cinema exemplified by the tagline “I Am Original. Kaya mo?” 

For all its forward-looking thrust, this year’s Cinema One Originals is all about celebrating the past, too, with Cinema One’s Restored Classics, which is more than just a showcase for nostalgia but is more a recognition of how pushing the form is a state of constant flux and how today’s classics were yesterday’s form-pushers, innovators and daring, adventurous originals, too. 

A plane crashes in the jungle and changes the lives of a nearby community when a cache of money is found among the wreckage by three friends, played by Johnny Delgado, Tony Santos Sr. and Ronnie Lazaro. Abbo De La Cruz’s bleak, blighted, and often harrowing Misteryo Sa Tuwa is as unflinching as it is incisive in negotiating the knotty ambiguities of greed, how deep and insidious its poisons can run and how thoroughly we metabolize it.