FINAL THOUGHTS The Viral Event No need to reheat the issue and offer a blow-by-blow account. I don't mind discussing it in person, but on the internet, things become weaponized. Once they do, we engage in the kind of discourse that devolves into commodified noise. In the end, we change nothing while giving social media companies everything. Let's not play that game for once. Suffice it to say, thirty minutes before the event, sensing what was about to take place, we made

QUEZON v AGUINALDO You Can't Lose With Quezon! The Bataan Miting de Avance. A fictional meeting of the three camps, but with speeches and events derived from the books. The entire scene, from start to finish, took two days to shoot, with around 50 shots to cover all necessary angles, reactions, and spatial relationships. To be honest, I could've used a few more shots to really sell the drama but we couldn't afford to add more. Also, we could've used maybe a hundred more ex

QUEZON v AGUINALDO You Can't Lose With Quezon! Despite his mestizo lineage, Quezon didn't come from a rich family. That is why the support his lavandera gave him during the gubernatorial campaign—she provided meals for his supporters using her own life savings—meant so much to him. It's a great underdog tale, but of course, by this point in his life, Quezon already had the necessary support of the Americans. His opponents proved no match for Quezon's tactical alliance

QUEZON v WOOD A Country Run Like Hell One of the fun things in recreating old silent films was introducing the right amount of flaws in the filming technique. I don't mean adding jitter, scratches and dirt in post-production but actually adding bumps in the dolly and uneven tripod swings in panning and tilting. You'll find plenty of awkward moves throughout Nadia's silent films. The gear back then wasn't as smooth and the frame rate makes the flaws more noticeable. This do

QUEZON v OSMEÑA Independence Is Good Enough To Eat Shooting this scene made me realize how absurd it was for Filipinos to adopt American fashion, especially outdoors. Veteranos + Pension Law Granted that the climate is hotter now and shooting in the middle of summer inside the cramped Manila North Cemetery with solar heat radiating off the concrete tombs was a recipe for heat stroke, but American formal wear is just plainly not for tropical climates. The Aguinaldo Pensi

Since there is unlikely to be any physical media for QUEZON, I won't have a chance to do a director's commentary for the film. So let me do it via a series of blog posts instead. This is for all the nerds out there. I've mentioned in many places that we went through roughly 50 titles during the research phase. Some books were significant from cover to cover, others had chapters or passages relevant to the project, regardless of their period in focus. To help me make sense of

Philippine flag colors...finally All three films of the Bayaniverse trilogy are coming to Prime Video this May 22. I'm also close to completion on a series of director's commentary blog posts for QUEZON, to be released around the same time. I decided to include screenshots of the actual historical sources—pages, paragraphs, excerpts—for nearly every important scene in the film, so it's been a lot of work. I'm also sharing the list of titles we had to go through to shape

Photo from Certified Kapamilya Facebook Page Folks, QUEZON is coming to Prime Video soon. My personal assignment is to release a series of director's commentary blog posts once the film goes online. Aside from the usual filmmaker notes, the series will include as much research material as possible to help viewers understand and appreciate the narrative path that we took. This includes most of the spicier stuff that might've been dismissed as fiction, et cetera. It'll al

The QUEZON Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is now available on Bandcamp ! I'll also be setting up direct purchase through this website and Soundcloud at some point in the future. Stay tuned for updates. Here are some sample tracks.