Pinoy Cinema is On the Rise

“Pinoy Cinema is On the Rise.”

These words appear at the end credits of my feature film, The Flip Side. They became a rallying cry for a small group of Filipino American filmmakers during the early 2000s, who—despite limited resources and funding—ventured to tell our stories on the big screen. It was an exciting time, when nearly every year a new Fil-Am indie feature was making its way into festivals and theaters. It was unprecedented. Historic. Unfortunately, now that period is becoming forgotten.    

“I don’t know about you, but I’m going to be the Filipino Spike Lee.”

These were the first words that John Castro, future co-writer of The Debut, spoke to me when we met in Intro to Film class in the Fall of 1990. We were two of only three Filipinos in Cal State Long Beach’s Film Studies Department, so we gravitated toward each other immediately. We took screenwriting and film history courses together and quickly became the go-to camera crew in our film production class. But neither of us became film majors to crew other people’s films.

We wanted to direct.

When John and I approached our professor about directing our own short films, his reply was both condescending and unsurprising: “You guys are a good crew, why don’t you just stick to that.” This from a white man to the only two students of color in his entire class. Hell no, were we going to listen to him. Our professor’s lack of support only made us more determined. We both ended up writing and directing multiple student shorts, most notably John’s hilarious mockumentary, Diary of a Gangsta Sucka, which follows the misadventures of Junior Aguinaldo, a Pinoy teen in middle-class suburbia with delusions of gangsters.

We also networked with the few Filipino film students we knew from other colleges in the L.A. area. Celine Salazar Parreñas—whose sets John and I helped build—made the experimental short Mahal Means Love and Expensive at UCLA’s graduate film program. Celine would go on to make many acclaimed shorts and documentaries and become a renown film professor and scholar. Gene Cajayon was based at Loyola Marymount University, where he made the short film that was to be the jumping off point for his Fil-Am coming of age feature, The Debut. I remember being impressed with Gene’s no-nonsense approach to fundraising and filmmaking. We knew he was a talent to watch.

All of us had big dreams of directing a feature after film school, and the race was on to see who’d become the first. Turned out, none of us on the West Coast would lay stake to that claim. Back East in New York, Francisco Aliwalas wrote, directed, and starred in the fun 1997 comedy Disoriented, about a pre-med student who deals with pressures from school, his job, and his family. It is generally considered to be the first narrative feature film made by and about Filipino Americans. Unfortunately, when lists are made of notable Fil-Am cinematic works, Disoriented is unjustly overlooked.

Watching Aliwalas’s film inspired me. If he could do it, why couldn’t I? Given the lack of a Filipino identity in the mainstream media, I knew there was no way any Hollywood producers would make a movie with Filipino lead characters. Without question, I would have to go the no-budget, independent route. I came up with The Flip Side, a comedic satire about three extremely different Filipino siblings trying to find themselves in America. In the daytime, I worked as a substitute teacher, saving every paycheck for the film’s $8,000 budget, I wrote the screenplay in the evenings, and on weekends I held cast auditions.

Meanwhile, John joined forces with Gene to knock out a new screenplay for The Debut, which incorporated themes from Gangsta Sucka. They shopped the script to every film studio in town, but were met with only rejection. Fortunately, they were able to find investors when Independence Day producer Dean Devlin became involved.

The year 1997 not only saw the premiere of Disoriented, but marked the summer that both The Debut and The Flip Side went into production. Despite working on separate projects, my film school partner and I were supportive of each other’s endeavors, giving each other script notes and sharing production war stories. I was excited for both of us. John and I were doing what we’d always talked about in film school during those late night discussions in my kitchen.

Three more years would pass before either The Debut or The Flip Side were completed. Three years of raising money from grants and private sources to pay for post-production and reshoots. Three years of going back to the monotony of our day jobs.

While both films stalled in post-production, 1999 brought Dom Magwili’s romcom feature, Much Adobo About Nothing, which had a weekend run of midnight shows at the AMC Sunset 5. Shot in one apartment over four days, The Los Angeles Times called Much Adobo, “minimalist filmmaking at its most delightful.”

In January of 2000, a major milestone occurred when Q. Allan Brocka became the first Filipino director to screen at the Sundance Film Festival with his funny short Rick & Steve the Happiest Gay Couple in All the World. Brocka—whose uncle was legendary filmmaker Lino Brocka—would turn Rick & Steve into a show that ran on MTV’s Logo Network and direct several LGBTQ films.

Finally in 2000, The Debut made its world premiere at the Directors Guild of America as part of the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. I remember the night being a jubilant celebration. The audience laughed and cheered along to the story of Dante Basco’s character, Ben Mercado, who learns to take pride in his Filipino heritage over the course of one epic party. I was particularly impressed with the way Gene shot each dance sequence, especially the powerful Singkil performance. Seeing our images, our beautiful brown faces projected on that twenty-five-foot tall screen was a joyous, transformative experience. Gene and John had done it.

In the following weeks, I finished up my final cut of The Flip Side in time to fly cross-country to attend the Independent Feature Film Market in New York City. Armed with video copies in hand, I went to the IFFM with one goal:

Meet a Sundance Film Festival programmer.

On the last day of the market, Sundance held a panel that was packed with hundreds of indie filmmakers in attendance. During the presentation, Heather Rae, head programmer for the Native Forum section, asked the crowd, “Are there any Native American or Asian Pacific filmmakers present?” Over a dozen directors and I raised our hands. “Come see me after.”    

Heather Rae loved The Flip Side. She fought hard to get my film into Sundance, and got in it did. On January 25, The Flip Side made its world premiere at the Yarrow Theater in Park City, Utah as part of the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. As I stepped to the front and looked into a sea of brown faces, it hit me that this was the first time ever that a Sundance audience was predominantly Filipino. I grabbed the mic and said, “Before we get to the movie, I wanna know: Are there any Filipinos in the house tonight?!” The crowd proceeded to go berserk. I finished up by saying, “If you haven’t figured it out from all the brown faces in the audience, The Flip Side is short for the Filipino side. It also stands for the B-side—or the side you never hear. So sit back and relax, ‘cause you’re about to take a trip there.”

The Flip Side became the first Filipino American feature film to screen at Sundance, and in the twenty years since, it’s unfortunately still the only one. I would be the first to say that this is more a commentary on Hollywood’s lack of diverse programming than a reflection of our community’s filmmaking talent.

In the Spring of 2001, both our features were invited to headline The San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, with The Flip Side opening the festival and The Debut closing it. Our crews hung out together, Gene, John, and I did joint radio interviews, and the Mayor of San Francisco declared it “Filipino American Movie Week” in all the newspapers. It was the most enjoyable festival experience I had—even more than Sundance. The whole community came out and celebrated us and our films. I felt like I’d come home.

During the months that followed, The Debut crew toured to theaters around the country, winning legions of fans and cementing the film’s status as an iconic Filipino American work. I had a more abbreviated theatrical run with The Flip Side, choosing instead to shop my next screenplay with my newly acquired agent. Unfortunately, I became faced with a reality I already knew: Despite the success of our films, Hollywood producers still weren’t ready to invest in telling Fil-Am stories. Some went as far as to tell me to change my Filipino lead characters to white. Hell, no. I refused to sell out, and I have zero regrets about it.

In the ensuing years, a handful of talented Filipino American and Filipino Canadian filmmakers made features that gained recognition and attracted audiences, notably: Laurice Guillen’s American Adobo (2001), Romeo Candido’s Lolo’s Child (2002), Chris Castillo’s The Sky is Falling (2002), Patricio Ginelsa’s Lumpia (2003), Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon’s Cavite (2005), and Edward J. Mallillin’s Brown Soup Thing (2008).

When the buzz on The Debut and The Flip Side inevitably faded, we returned to regular life. We’d spent five plus years working on our respective films, and still longer touring them. We were burnt out and partially in debt. Gene started a family, John enrolled in culinary school in Hawaii and became a chef, and I endured Hollywood rejection after rejection before being dropped by my agent. I returned to teaching before eventually mounting a new career as an author. None of us made another feature film, which, more than anything, speaks to the lack of support for Filipino stories in Hollywood.

The Fil-Am Cinema Movement of the early 2000s came at a time when Filipinos did not exist on our TVs or the big screen. We were utterly invisible. But a handful of us dared to try to change that narrative. We groundbreaking filmmakers and our struggles are a part of Filipino American history. Seek out our films, watch them, tell others about them. These films—and the making of them—tell our people’s story and struggle here in America at 24 frames per second.

Respect to the new generation of Fil-Am feature film directors who are continuing the struggle today: Mathew Abaya (Vampiriah, 2016), H.P. Mendoza (Bitter Melon, 2018), Diane Paragas (Yellow Rose, 2019), Mallorie Ortega (The Girl Who Left Home, 2020), Patricio Ginelsa (Lumpia With a Vengeance, 2020), Dante Basco (The Fabulous Filipino Brothers, 2021).

Pinoy Cinema is STILL on the rise! Happy Filipino American History Month!