Tag: Martika Ramirez Escobar

Open Endings (Nigel Santos, 2025)

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Is it acceptable to be friends with your exes? Charlie’s (Janella Salvador) bond with her friendship group made up of women who’ve all been romantically entangled at one point or another becomes a problem for her new relationship. Rafa (Rachel Coates) finds the situation altogether too weird, and even goes so far as to ask Charlie to cut her friends off. It might not be a good idea to date someone who tries to isolate you from friends and family, but Rafa claims these are just her boundaries and she can’t help feeling uneasy with Charlie spending so much time with women she’s previously slept with.

Then again, it’s not easy to be gay in the Philippines and this community is quite small. Can you really afford to cut people off just because of potential awkwardness? Each of the women is struggling in their own way, but tries to support her friends and is supported in return. The group only really formed as the exes banded together to look after Hannah when her partner passed away. Sundays have now become sacred to them as a time they can all come together and share their fears and worries no matter the various unresolved feelings that exist between them.

These relationships are often messy and ill-defined, but genuine and heartfelt. For Kit (Klea Pineda), friendship is most the beautiful of gifts and she fears acting on her feelings for Charlie because she doesn’t want to ruin what they have. Still closeted not wanting to upset her parents are religious and conservative, Kit is in an awkward non-relationship with a married woman who is also the mother of one of her pupils at the school where she teaches. Alexa (Yesh Anne Burce) is trapped with a heteronormative relationship she cannot escape because divorce is still not legal in the Philippines. Constrained by her own circumstances, she becomes possessive of Kit who is the only path back to her authentic self and the only person with whom she can be free. In other ways, however, perhaps the impossibility relationship suits Kit because she cannot be her authentic self either while unable to reveal her sexuality to her parents. 

The impossibility of divorce is also a factor when Hannah (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) suddenly drops the bombshell that she’s become engaged to a man. The group’s only bisexual, Hannah faces prejudice from her family who express relief that she’s finally got over her lesbian phase and rediscovered the right path, while the friends also see it as a kind of betrayal though perhaps only because she kept her new relationship secret from them for several months. Charlie is also subjected to homophobic violence when a man barges into the gay bar where she’s drinking and propositions her, insisting that she is “alone” because he’s only seen her with another woman. When he finally figures it out, he sees it as a challenge and quickly becomes violent. 

These kinds of petty aggressions remind the women of their precarious position within a hostile society that enforcers heteronormativity and traditional gender roles. Their friendship is a small bubble of resistance that gives each of the women additional confidence to continue being who they are. This atmosphere of hostility plays into Mihan’s insecurities, her far of commitment and inability to clearly declare her feelings. She resents Hannah for choosing to marry a man as if she were doing it because of social expectation rather than personal desire, while also forced to accept that this is all her fault. She had plenty of time to try and patch things up with Hannah, but never did. 

The open-ended nature of these relationships leaves Mihan with anxiety, but it also allows these women to continue being friends and supporting each other. The friendship doesn’t have to end just because the romance did. But at the same time, she has to accept that the risk of heartbreak is something that has to be actively embraced and her tendency to skip out on relationships the moment they become serious leaves her only with a lack of resolution. Painting a warm and funny portrait of contemporary queer life in the Philippines which nevertheless does not shy away from its difficulties, Open Endings celebrates most of all the joyousness and power of female friendship in the face of social hostility.

Open Endings screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Leonor Will Never Die (Ang Pagbabalik ng Kwago, Martika Ramirez Escobar, 2022)

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A grief-stricken screenwriter resolves to write her way out of self-imposed inertia while trapped in a world of her own creation in Martika Ramirez Escobar’s meta dramedy Leonor Will Never Die (Ang Pagbabalik ng Kwago). Drawing inspiration from the action exploitation films of the 1980s, the film asks some big questions about grief and agency and the role stories play in our lives while celebrating a sense of community in cinema along with the accidental immortality it may grant. 

Once a successful screenwriter of action films, Leonor Reyes (Sheila Francisco) is now an elderly lady who has largely shut herself away following the tragic death of her eldest son, Ronwaldo (Anthony Falcon). Her youngest, Rudie (Bong Cabrera), still lives with her but as she later reveals there is distance between them and a sort of repellant dependency in which each resents the other and longs for freedom while simultaneously afraid to chase it. When Leonor “forgets” to pay her electricity bill and is berated by Rudie, she is handed a newspaper by the ghost of Ronwaldo containing an ad for a screenplay competition and decides to dust off the script she broke off when he died. While taking a cigarette break, she is hit on the head by a flying TV thrown out by the man next-door fed up with his wife’s addiction to soap operas and finds herself falling into the world of the film hoping she can save the hero, also named Ronwaldo (Rocky Salumbides), from his tragic fate. 

Shifting into a grainy 4:3 with mono aural sound, Escobar perfectly recreates the world of retro action drama but subtly updates it from its Marcos-era backdrop in replacing activists with drug users, her authoritarian thugs carrying out extrajudicial killings for reasons of intimidation. The movie Ronwaldo is set on revenge against a corrupt mayor and his vigilante son who shot his brother and then placed a pistol and a small packet of drugs next to the body, resisting authoritarianism in a way it may not have actually been possible to do so directly in the movies of the past. In any case, Leonor slips into her own screenplay as an awkward omnipotent force writing as she goes but struggling with her own role and agency before picking up a hammer and venturing into danger to rescue the hero and his love interest herself.  

From the other side of the screen, Rudie asks her if she’d be OK with someone else finishing her screenplay which is in a way asking her if she’s alright with her final decisions being made for her. That might be what Leonor is trying to decide for herself by rewriting in real time, searching for the right ending for her life’s story. Rudie had resented his mother, blaming her for keeping him behind when he planned to apply for an overseas work visa to join his boyfriend abroad but she wonders if he isn’t just using her as an excuse while afraid to take the risk. She by turn insists she can manage alone, but is perhaps afraid she can’t which, along with the grief she feels over Ronwaldo’s death, leads her to push him away. 

Leonor’s coma perhaps brings them both clarity that allows them to discover what it is they really want, Rudie finally handing agency back to his mother in telling her do what she has to do in a world of her own creation while she tells both her sons to be sure they write their own lives. The doctor had told Rudie that Leonor was trapped in a world between sleeping and waking and that you can’t wake someone who is not asleep, they will have to find a way to escape by themselves something which in one way or another Leonor perhaps does coming to terms with Ronwaldo’s death and breaking free of her grief through recapturing her creative spirit if writing a poetic end for herself. Then again as an authorial voice breaks through, life is never as simple as narrative and we’re rarely given the opportunity to edit our own stories or decide the way in which they end, perhaps Leonor isn’t either but even so passes into a world of joy and song in which there are no real endings only a great expanse of cinema. Charmingly surreal and filled with good humour, Leonor Will Never Die is at once the story of an old woman rediscovering herself while letting go of her grief and a celebration of escapist pleasures as paths towards self actualisation. 

Leonor Will Never Die screens in Amsterdam on 30th October as part of this year’s Imagine Fantastic Film Festival.

US release trailer (English subtitles)