Scotch Pilgrim

A famous American filmmaker travels to the Yucatán to scout locations for his last movie. The Mayan Apocalypse intercedes

Raya Martin loves old silent films and knows better than anyone how to use old moods and techniques in his own films. You could say that he loves experimental films and that he manages to revitalise the old techniques. Here he looks at boxers, even though we hardly see them.

Rita is named after a famous American movie star whom her late, former actress grandmother once adored. She lives in one of Manila’s oldest districts with her busy mother and entrepreneurial aunt. Years later, she is still the same girl enamoured with television, now also tending to her aunt’s stall selling pirated DVD movies. Elsewhere, there survives footages of a movie done before the war.

Purports to document the production of a short about a young man’s first sexual experience while doubling as a coming-out film and a multiply layered making-of movie.

Impressionistic images from a train ride.

A man travelling on the sea.

A tribute to filmmakers and National Artists Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal. In the "Day" segment, Piolo Pacual portrays the role of William, a drug addict who tries to rebuild his sense of self and reconnect with the people around him. For the "Night" segment, Pascual portrays the role of Philip, who works as a bodyguard for a mayor's son. The bodyguard believes that his boss considers him as part of the family but after a shooting incident, he realizes his real worth to his boss. As he struggles to hide, he is slowly consumed by the claws of darkness lurking the city.

In another lifetime, a Spanish couple takes drugs and teleports through their television set. A troubled young man travels through the countryside and meets a lost woman. During the trip, they discover a museum housing the expatriated paintings of the most important Filipino artist of the revolution. Eventually, the Spanish couple disappears toward their colony. Inspired by one of the earliest teleportation accounts, which happened between the Philippines and Mexico during the colonial period.

A group of friends, sharing a passion for cinema, assemble in Corregidor, a small island in Manila Bay that has preserved relics from the Pacific War as its foremost attractions. There, they explore the island and retire in a rustic mansion used once to make silent films. Outside the city, the woods and sea become a meeting place for more movie personalities and it all becomes a celebration of what was left behind.

In Raya Martin’s thuggish fable of disengagement, a teenage girl grows distant from her parents before possibly vanishing altogether. But this is no angst drama. It’s defiance against a kind of ordered existence, treating death like a game, living life in a soft-focus daze, ready to evaporate if pushed far enough. The girl and all the other faceless kids wander numbly in slow motion through the brush, through the parental jabber, only the electronic drone keeping them from losing their bearings.