An assassin, a porn dubber and a transgender. Three souls. One explicit illusion. To find the ultimate joy in their empty lives. A safe haven, where passion and love mean humanity, ecstasy means enlightenment; and the soul is the ultimate arbiter of the truth.
A land-grabbing tycoon and a former sexy male actor are in a tight race for mayor in a small town. When violence erupts, Emmy, a teacher, runs into the wilderness with a ballot box, the last copy of the election result.
When an alien comes back to take him, a mouthless young man's life twists and turns as his memories untangle.
A pessimistic uninspired middle-aged artist finds spark with a millennial photographer who leads her on a path of creative and sexual reawakening.
Maxi, a boy on the cusp of his teens, is already comfortable with his homosexual feelings, with acceptance from his family. When Maxi is assaulted one evening, Victor, a police officer, comes to his aid. Maxi soon develops a crush on Victor, who shows a platonic affection for the young lad.
Ace, 23, and Miko, 17, desperately want to become famous actors but it seems the Universe has a different plan for their lives.
Four men, four stories, all intersect in Manila. Episode one is about Ariel, a con-man. Episode two is about Boy, an expectant father. In the third episode, Ronald goes to Manila to sell a building. And in the fourth story Baste saves his sister from Ariel.
Hendrix dreams of hip-hop greatness, but he’s spiraling down a rabbit-hole of crime and poverty until he meets Doc, an old poet still haunted by his martial law past. Can they turn each other’s lives around before they’re swallowed by their circumstance?
A fourteen-year-old farm boy’s life is suddenly upended when a video of him brutally attacking a classmate goes viral.
A small-town midwife’s preparation for a job interview is disrupted by series of unfortunate turn of events.
An awkward 6-footer teen is forced to learn and play volleyball half-heartedly when the Catholic school she transferred to did not have a basketball team. Everything changes when she meets their star player.
A Marikina shoemaker's daughter coming to terms with her grief in the wake of her father's suicide.
A woman relieves the heavy burden from her past when she finally exacts revenge on the man who murdered her entire family.
When their teacher disappears, school children cradle guns in their arms instead of books.
The title “Kamera Obskura” is a Filipino spelling of the latin “Camera Obscura” which simply means “dark room”. The film’s concept adheres to formalist cinema, where the filmmaker’s thesis is to make a semblance of a vintage film seemingly produced sometime in the late 1920s to early 1930s in the Philippines. The thesis is to conjure up a film from a period that did not really exist in Philippine cinema’s historical cultural heritage as we know it, such as a pseudo-expressionist / experimental Filipino cinema of the silent film era. It is a film within a film. The narrative plays with the idea of a retro-futurist world where a prisoner locked away in a dark chamber for over two decades only sees the reality of the world outside through the small hole in his cell, which projects an image of the city on his wall, the phenomenon of the “camera obscura”.
A public hospital serves as a witness to a young boy’s rite of passage when he is stuck to take care of his ailing father. Caught in a place where life itself is in limbo, the boy treats the hospital grounds as his playground, not knowing that it will be his source of liberation in the end.
A socio-realist drama-comedy film, it follows a seemingly usual day in the life of Loida Malabanan as she embarks on yet another shooting day of a soap opera as an extra. As the shoot goes on, we get a glimpse of the truth in the ruling system of the production as well as the exploitation of the marginalized laborers like her.
A former student activist returns to the Philippines to find the daughter she was forced to leave behind.
Elizabeth, a self-made woman in her late 40s, is bent on living on her own for the rest of her days. After her mother passes from years of suffering from a lingering illness, she meets Jon, a man 20 years her junior, who convinces her that love knows no age and that there are no limits to life’s starts. They embark on a May-December affair that is very promising, until Liz realizes that Jon has dreams that she cannot be part of.
Kasal is a slice of life drama of a gay couple whose resolve to stay together is challenged as they attend a wedding. It also is an examination on how a gay couple navigates through the different institutions in Philippine society.
