The gritty and 'pretty': Davao City through the lens of local filmmaking’s new breed

An closer look into the short films of Wowa Medroso and Conrad dela Cruz

Last year, I wrote a personal essay on digital piracy, particularly that era of pirated DVDs that became formative to my own cinephilia. I attempted a hybrid of recollection and secondary research, but it really felt that the piece was fueled more by my own nostalgia, my affinity to the fragility of the film media of that era that is now succumbing to the popularity and ubiquity of streaming, legit and otherwise. The text’s structure is fractured, written in ‘chapters’ like in a DVD. At first the approach felt experimental, then grew elemental, as I was writing it.

Around the 2000s, Mantex, along San Pedro Street, became the mecca of film buffs like me, and other pirated DVD joints in Mini-Forest Boulevard and Uyanguren’s Chinatown areas. This slice of late-2000 local history forms the backdrop of Conrad dela Cruz’s Bootleg, about two DVD pirates who enter into the world of drug dealing with the waning profitability of digital piracy.

But the realization that I failed to mention the film in the digital piracy essay hit me like only a blow of regret can, because I felt it belonged to one of those chapters, neatly tying the reportage with fiction. Dela Cruz’s short was released in 2019 during the 17th edition of the Mindanao Film Festival. This elision from memory is even more astonishing with the fact that I programmed it myself for the festival. But just like its subject, the film is a memorabilia of a present-day city caught between impermanence, between destruction and construction.

Bootleg (2019) shows the trades of digital piracy and drug dealing in 2000s Davao.

Bootleg’s narrative is divided into the trades of piracy and drug-dealing. And there’s an interesting subplot that sets this pirate-vendor trade in motion when there is a request to pirate a Filipino independent film. The process is methodical and seemingly fool-proof. The era’s depiction is not without its anachronisms, especially for those familiar with Davao at the time. An exterior shot of the long-gone Queens theatre (the marquee of which at some point was still lit in neon-red around late 2010s) cuts to the interior of a present-day Cinematheque, which is smaller in size. Or its use of mini-DV tapes and camcorder. But this is a minor quibble—after all the 2000s was an era that was in such a flux, technology-wise, and Dela Cruz’s films comfortably exist in their own manufactured universe.

In Bootleg, Dela Cruz is able to deftly weave the urban realism into his visually saturated worlds. Facets of Davao that obviously will not make its way into the city’s erstwhile tourism slogan, ‘life is here’. The use of handheld camerawork recalls some of Brillante Mendoza’s potent depictions of urban space. Through Dela Cruz’s lens (he is also the cinematographer in his films), the city’s rhythm and claustrophobia is evoked. We experience an urban Davao that is gradually shrinking and disintegrating: a hole-in-the-wall drinking joint now demolished, a gay nightclub now deserted, and a portion of the then-to-be-constructed Davao Coastal Road being built seen from the vantage point of Matina Aplaya, where a chunk of Davao’s urban poor resides.

Matina Aplaya is also the setting of Sherad Anthony Sanchez’s Imburnal (Sewer, 2008), a 3.5-hour meditation on lost youth and latent violence in the city, shadowed by vigilante killings attributed to the mysterious Davao Death Squad (DDS), linked to but denied by then-city mayor and former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. Dela Cruz cites Imburnal as a painful watch because of the runtime but also that it had ‘awakened’ something in him. In March 2009, the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights (CHR) launched a probe into the unsolved killings, with Duterte attributing it to drug trade and gang rivalries. Dela Cruz would tackle this rivalry in End Times (2022), once again probing the city’s nooks and criminal underworld in a battle for turf and survival.

I first encountered Dela Cruz’s work in a student film competition in one of Davao’s universities when he was still a student. One jury member, a high ranking university official, dismissed his film (entitled Once Upon a Time in Davao, also a drug-related tale), as not reflecting the school’s “values”. Heavens forbid the schools are now condoning criminality with these short films! There is no shade of modern-day heroism in Dela Cruz’s crime films, no grand moral statements. Just criminals hardened by poverty and survival. A city is not a utopian ideal after all.

In December last year, just before Christmas, at the rooftop bar of Suazo in downtown Davao, I sat down and recorded a podcast with Dela Cruz and his contemporary, Joshua Cesar ‘Wowa’ Medroso, both promising young Davao filmmakers who started their current filmmaking path almost the same time, when their films competed at the 2019 MFF. Medroso made Trabungko, a fantasy retelling of the myth of his birthplace Tibungco, a district located in the outskirts of Davao City.

A fantastic origin tale of Tibungco shows a Lakan on a quest for the mythical stone of Trabungko (2019).

Trabungko managed to be lavish-looking despite budget limitations. Filmmaking in the regions is budget filmmaking, Medroso says. But what struck me was how he was able to churn out a vibrancy from a place that is drab and dusty from the surface. The ostentatious costume changes match the tableau-like and hallucinatory intermissions awash in red and blue, in contrast to the film’s sepia-toned default. When I brought up Tarsem Singh’s The Fall, Medroso—who also cites the impact of digital piracy to his love for films—was quick to point out its inspiration.

There’s a scene in Trabungko, before the Lakan (played by Brian Dowlson Jadjuli) sets off with his quest for the Trabungko stone, where his disrobing is veiled by a transparent piece of fabric, light and shadow teasing out his physique. It’s probably one of those ‘pretty’ shots that Medroso jokingly owns, during our podcast, while assigning the gritty to Dela Cruz. Trabungko’s Lakan-and-Hiyas mythologizing isn’t particularly unique, with a universal allusion to origin stories and legends passed on from one generation to the next. And yet there is a seriousness to which Medroso treats its ‘prettiness’, its artificiality.

Tibungco, and its adjacent barangays, are seen from Davao’s main highway as largely industrial, dotted by container vans from shipping lines and the giant cylinders from a cement company, which indicates that you have almost reached Davao’s boundary to the north. In his sophomore film Kumbiyor (The Conveyor Belt), Medroso was able to make use of his place’s remoteness, its existence between the urban and rural spaces of the city, as a futuristic landscape when the world is gripped by a zombie apocalypse. This time, he drains the film of color but still manages to be, well, pretty. There’s a stunning wide shot of the cement company’s facade with the conveyor belt in between that is eerily prophetic.

While zombie encounters are present, at the film’s heart is the unlikely tandem of two survivors: a boy with a gun (also played by Jadjuli) and a boy with a camera, on the way to Samal Island—which is not quite Davao but an island-city that can be reached via ferry boat in minutes—which is reportedly uninfected. Medroso establishes the milieu convincingly: isolated shots of a bridge, transmission lines, a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere. But apart from the black-and-white cinematography that captures the desolation so well, there is the dialogue that reaches for the poetic. “There’s something in the air…the silence. Something has changed, hasn’t it?” echoes one of the chance characters.

But Kumbiyor’s highlight is the relationship that develops between the two characters, set in motion by the death of the boy-with-gun’s brother. Their rumination on existence differ from realist to cynical, but the sense of male bond and intimacy comes through in a unifying act of brotherhood.  There’s a muted queerness that emanates from Kumbiyor. The Lakan in Trabungko also has a trusted male friend who is both jester and advisor. Medroso offers us a gracefulness and hope even in the face of imminent death, which could very well reflect the mood of filmmakers during the pandemic, the time in which Kumbiyor was made.

In Ritwal (2023), Dela Cruz shows his affinity for found-footage horror in this reincarnation of Maria Labo.

Dela Cruz made twin-bill shorts called Living Dead and Dead in the Dark during the pandemic. Two different films but seemingly existing in the same setting—a nondescript interior of a house. Both films are neon-soaked bloodbath, with a pulpy aesthetic befitting a midnight madness lineup. Dead in the Dark won best short film at the 8th edition of Ngilngig Asian Fantastic Film Festival in 2022. It opens with a seedy dating—or sex—infomercial which appears on TV at midnight. The camera at times appears to be defocused except at the center recalling a similar approach in Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux. Only in Dela Cruz’s microcosmic version of inferno, there’s only darkness. By the time the devil appears, the usefulness of a plot—about two thieves breaking and entering—is abandoned. Hell just breaks loose.

In 2023, the Davao City coastal road that was still in construction in Dela Cruz’s Bootleg is now mostly complete and publicly accessible, even becoming a local tourist attraction. He returns to it in his recent short film, Ritwal, which earned him a Best Director trophy at the last MFF in December 2023, with the same thread of violence and bloodbath of his “Dead” shorts. Reincarnating the myth of Maria Labo, the female aswang of our generation, Ritwal is another grindhouse fun that consolidates modern horror tropes, from the lure of urban legends to the manufactured glitches of found-footage horror. Unlike the random-ness of the “Dead” films, there is a sense of comeuppance that befalls the amateur filmmakers in Ritwal, similar to the gang of youth’s fate in Pedring Lopez’s underrated found-footage Darkroom.

Wowa Medroso’s Tong Adlaw Nga Nag-Snow sa Pinas (2022) was shot in his of birthplace Tibungco in Davao City.

Last year, Medroso entered the Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival through his short film ‘Tong Adlaw Nga Nag-Snow sa Pinas (The Day it Snowed in the Philippines), about two boys obsessed with snow and Samurai movies, that is also a commentary on domestic violence and child abuse. The film was produced under the Film Development Council of the Philippine’s (FDCP) Sine Kabataan in 2022. It was a giant leap—but kind of in reverse—for the filmmaker whose previous films were 30 to 40 minutes long. The film lab requires a five-minute runtime for the final film output. The mentoring sessions helped, according to him, in eliminating narrative excesses, and it proved successful, as his film bested other entries of the youth-centered festival. It also won Best Film at the Binisaya Film Festival in Cebu that year. (A year that was dominated by young Davao filmmakers: Jury Prize when to Jakol, or Claire de Lulu in D Major by Doydoy Megriño, and Gatas by Megriño’s fellow Monkayo native Emeperador Santiago, which won in Binisaya’s Shootout Category, a 24-hour filmmaking competition.)

Medroso continues his Cinemalaya streak with his first feature-length film Kantil, expected to grace the festival this year, and produced with the festival’s funding. It will be a science-fiction queer story featuring two boys that feels like a continuation of his Sine Kabataan short, and will still be set in Tibungco, particularly in the urban poor parts of the district. Meanwhile, Dela Cruz bides his time and says that he would like to “commit more mistakes” with short films before embarking on a full-length project, planning to complete a trilogy of horror shorts which started from Ritwal.

Though vastly different in style, Dela Cruz and Medroso who started on a similar trajectory, form part of a young filmmaking generation engaging with an evolving regional cinema in the Philippines—toggling urban sensibilities that capture the gritty realism of their city and the socio-political consciousness of a distinctly Mindanaoan storytelling tradition that lie in its margins.

This essay was completed under the author’s Arts Equator Fellowship.

Note: Some short films of the filmmakers are available in a popular video streaming site.