News

The distributor has acquired Us rights from Films Distribution to Brillante Mendoza’s Philippines Oscar submission.

Ma’ Rosa received its world premiered in Cannes where it earned Jaclyn Jose the best actress award.

The film takes place against the backdrop of police corruption as parents of a poor family in Manila sells drugs on the side to make ends meet.

First Run Features is planning a spring 2017 release.

Julio Diaz, Andi Eigenmann, Felix Roco, Mercedes Cabral, Jomari Angeles, Maria Isabel Lopez, Inna Tuason and Baron Geisler round out the key cast.

Marc Mauceri of First Run Features brokered the deal with Nicolas Brigaud-Robert of Films Distribution.

Coming back to Cannes Film Festival after last year’s Taklub in the Un Certain Regard section, Filipino director Brillante Mendoza will return to the main competition line-up with Ma’ Rosa. His first time back in the section since he picked up Best Director in 2009 for Kinatay, the first trailer has arrived today for the intense-looking drama.

According to the official synopsis, the plot follows “Rosa, mother of four, owns a small convenient store in the slums of Manila. To make ends meet, Rosa and her husband, Nestor, sell narcotics on the side, until the police comes to arrest them. Their children have to trade the little they have left to pay off the police.”

Check out the trailer below for the film starring Jaclyn Rose, Julio Diaz, Felix Roco, Andi Eigenmann, Kristofer King, Mercedes Cabral, Jomari Angeles, and Maria Isabel Lopez.

Cannes 2016 begins on May 11th.

Festival scene regular Brillante Mendoza is certainly a divisive filmmaker with his shaky-cam, documentary-like sensibilities. Like Hong Sang-soo has evidently uncovered, if you're a filmmaker who frequents Cannes with success, you're likely to catch the eyes of French-thesp Isabelle Huppert who's starring in the helmer's latest effort, "Captive." Based on the true story of the 2001 kidnapping of 20 hotel guests from the island of Palawan in the Philippines by the group known as Abu Sayyaf with Huppert playing a foreign missionary who is caught up in it all. While the clips are in Filipino with French subtitles, you can the sense of the film's about and Mendoza's style which, if anything, seems suited to story like this. Other than Huppert, we also spotted Mendoza's "Lola" star Rustica Carpio among the chaos with Maria Isabel Lopez, Mercedes Cabral and Joel Torre co-starring. "Captive," in fact, premiered at the...

It was about a year ago that speculation first cropped up that controversial helmer Brillante Mendoza -- who won a divisive Best Director award at Cannes for his audience-splitting "Kinatay" -- would return to the Croisette with his latest effort, "Captured." The film was apparently in post-production and headed to the finish line...and then word went quiet. Well, the movie is now in the can and headed to Berlin, and some fresh images have cropped up to give us a taste. Isabelle Huppert continues her journey through the foreign arthouse world (she also stars in Hong Sang-Soo's upcoming "In Another Country" -- first image here) by featuring here alongside Katherine Mulville, Marc Zanetta, Maria Isabel Lopez and Rustica Carpio in the based-on-a-true-story tale of Thérèse Bourgoin (Huppert), a French woman who worked for a humanitarian organization on Palawan Island in the Philippines only to be kidnapped by mistake...

Set in the southernmost and arguably the most marginalized portions of the Philippine archipelago, Sheron Dayoc's Halaw (Ways of the Sea) documents the attempts of several of its citizens to secure a better life by crossing borders via the sea that separates the hopelessness in Mindanao and the promises of Sabah. The first half of the film, set on land, gives the audiences a glimpse of the lives sought to be changed, from the recruiter (John Arcilla) who manages the goods he has to bring to Malaysia intact and untainted to the Badjao siblings who seek to be reunited with their missing mother. The latter half, set primarily on sea, maps the journey and defines the relationships, until they reach their destination.

 

During the film's first half, Dayoc, gifted with the ability to tell stories through gestures instead of the giveaway expository powers of words, compiles an array of emotions from his subjects,...

Jose Javier Reyes' Working Girls is a disappointment. Just like the counterfeit bags one of Reyes' characters peddles to her internet clients, the film hardly matches the 1984 Ishmael Bernal satire with the same title that it supposedly updates. Even if independently assessed of Bernal's acclaimed urban comedy, Working Girls is still an unforgivably incoherent, annoyingly shallow, and ultimately pointless exercise. In an interview, Reyes admits that this film was made as a sort of tribute to Bernal and Amado Lacuesta, screenwriter of the 1984 comedy. Given Reyes' intentions for writing and directing this update of Bernal's classic, I can only conclude that this films' biggest achievement is that it will inevitably raise awareness of the existence of Bernal's film, and hopefully gain for it more followers.

 

Perhaps my displeasure for Reyes' film is a tad exaggerated. Reyes, I admit, is a very smart and able writer whose gift for gab...