Movies: Hazel Orencio

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema....

In the 16th century, Ferdinand Magellan, a young and ambitious Portuguese navigator, rebels against the power of the King of Portugal, who doesn’t support his dream of discovering the world, and persuades the Spanish monarchy to fund his bold expedit...

An embittered law student commits a brutal double murder; a family man takes the fall and is forced into a harsh prison sentence; a mother and her two children wander the countryside looking for some kind of redemption....

Andrés Bonifacio is celebrated as the father of the Philippines Revolution against Spanish colonial rule. This eight-hour epic examines this myth, undertaking an expedition into history through various interwoven narrative threads, held together by a...

Deliberately structured and less beholden to its narrative, the film is told in three parts, with each part pertaining to each of the three visits of the time-travelling visitor from when the country was fighting for independence from Spain....

Continuing the tradition of national artist Ishmael Bernal's benchmark film Working Girls after 25 years, Working Girls of 2010 depicts the role of women in the new millennium. Seven women of different backgrounds, stories and personalities entwined ...

The Philippines, 1972. Mysterious things are happening in a remote barrio. Wails are heard from the forest, cows are hacked to death, a man is found bleeding to death at the crossroad and houses are burned. Ferdinand E. Marcos announces Proclamation ...

An artist struggles to finish his work while a storyline about a cult plays in his head. As the cult spirals towards a fundamentalism that will destroy the world, the artist decides to destroy his muse to redeem the world....

Madmen control Manila in 2034 after massive volcanic eruptions have plunged Southeast Asia into darkness....

A counselor/psychiatrist suspects a lingering case of phantosmia, a phantom smell, and possibly caused by a deep psychological fracture....

With the imminent death of his autocratic grandfather, coinciding with the burgeoning oppressive regime of Ferdinand Marcos, Servando Monzon III, inheritor of the hacienda and businesses of his powerful clan, agonizes on becoming the new feudal lord ...

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A young woman is held captive by her father and forced to become a prostitute. Meanwhile, two men embark on a personal quest for buried treasure. However, both groups of people show signs of debilitating illness....

Philippines, late 1970s. A military-controlled militia is oppressing a remote village, spreading terror both physical and psychological. The fearless young doctor Lorena who opened a clinic for the poor disappears without a trace. Her husband, activi...

Lieutenant Hermes Papauran, one of the best investigators in the Philippines, is at a deep moral crossroads. He is a first-hand witness of the murderous anti-drug campaign conducted by his force, his anxiety and guilt triggering a severe skin disease...

Six single women and a priest's lives intersect when a bingo marathon is launched in their church for the barangay fiesta, turning expectations and relationships upside down and inside out....

A puppeteer returns home hoping to settle down but gets his heart broken. Communicating only using his puppet, he decides to go on a journey with a nun, a sex worker and a teenage boy to a remote island where gold has been discovered....

To this day, Ishmael Bernal's movie Himala is still in our town, in our world. This will be reflected in the broader perspective of the majority, of the surrounding events. Beliefs still lie in the truth. Consciousness is still dominant at the level ...

Three illegal miners journey back to their island after months of toiling in hellish conditions. With their hard-earned money, they traversed the sea, the mountains and the forest until they reached their destination. Or did they really reach their c...

Erwin Romulo, the late Alexis Tioseco’s best friend, recalls the events after the critic and his girlfriend Nika Bohinc’s untimely death in their home in Quezon City. Diaz makes use of one long take to allow Romulo an uninterrupted narration of the e...