Wednesday, May 13, 2026
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 291.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, May 11, 2026
7:18 PM |
My Brain When I'm Cleaning
Currently cleaning the apartment, which means that my ADHD brain is firing all cylinders and getting new ideas, which means that I have to stop once in a while to take notes [or else forget them] or to message someone. This is why it takes me three days to clean my apartment.Labels: cleanliness, life, mental health
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Sunday, May 10, 2026
2:16 PM |
Second Chances
I love The Drama for personal reasons, because it gets what has been true in my life: people getting second chances. Emma got a second chance, and in the movie, she gives everyone second chances. We all need second chances. My life has been all about second chances.Labels: film, life, movie log
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
9:00 AM |
Celebrations and Commiserations
April was one big beautiful madness for me. Right from its very start that month, I was in Iloilo City [for the first time ever] to take part of that UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy’s celebration of National Food Month—a few days of magnificent feasting which more than proved Iloilo City’s point over why it was thus designated as a culinary capital for the country. A week later, I was off doing the 3rd Dumaguete Literary Festival, where I also launched my latest fiction collection, and also got to witness Dumaguete being officially designated as UNESCO Creative City of Literature. On the day the festival ended, I was also part of the UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines [UNACOM]’s writeshop, which gathered together cultural advocates from around the country in a project to foster a book detailing the richness of UNESCO-designated places in the Philippines. And then a week later, after settling down for a few days to start summer school, I was doing a week-long book tour in Manila, from making my debut at Dia del Libro to doing a book talk at UP Likhaan at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. Sometimes I wondered where I was channeling my energy. I am fifty years old, not exactly a spring chicken anymore.
I realized even then that I was very privileged to have been given the chances to do all of these things. But now, on the tenth day of May, I have finally rested enough to do a bit of introspection. It’s a bit jarring, truth to tell, to find myself beholding slower days these days, but thank God for that. Rest is essential.
Last Friday, just for the sake of being around friends in a more social context [besides doing events together], we went for a dinner, a very lovely one, at Mohammad Malik’s farm in Palinpinon, Valencia with Pinspired’s Evgeniya Spiridonova and Max Vasiliev as our guests of honor. This was ostensibly to celebrate their new baby, and so we informally called the gathering “Jane’s Russian Dinner”—simply for the fact that this dinner was supposed to have happened last December, where she promised to prepare a Russian dish called “shuba,” on the very night she unexpectedly gave birth to her second child, which caused its deferment.
The fulfillment of that canceled dinner came five months later, because there was much to celebrate. There was news of new pregnancies, of impending weddings, of new scholarships abroad, and of recent events coming to successful fulfillments—and so we gathered. Aside from Jane and Max, there was Mohammed Malik and Finola Uy, our hosts. And Libraria’s Ernest and Gayle Acar. And the artists Hersley-Ven Casero and Toulla Mavromati-Casero. And Renz Torres and me—really the gay representation of the lot. [Unfortunately, another couple, the writer Hannah Portugal-Magno and her medical doctor husband Pito Magno, had to beg off at the last minute, because of an emergency.] So we celebrated all these over Renz’s grilled bangus and ampalaya salad, and Gayle’s lemon orzo with feta and alugbati, and Toulla’s peanut noodles and Greek stir-fry, Ella’s coffee bake and fresh fruits, Mo’s biko, Hersley’s baye-baye from Baywan, and Jane’s beef stroganoff and the pièce de résistance, her shuba [or “herring under a fur coat”].
The talk over the delicious, very international, meal was celebratory, but we also came to realize that despite all the good news, we were also commiserating over sudden deaths and accidents that pushed us to the edge. One of us on that table actually revealed he almost had a heart attack last month—probably from stress and from the unbearable heat that is now defining the current summer in Dumaguete. This was shocking. (Because what do you mean we almost lost you, and we didn’t even know?)
Then we made a brief recounting of unfortunate things of recent days.
How Onna Rhea Quizo’s father died a few days before the start of the Duma LitFest, but that she still chose to perform in the short play Sisa: Panaghoy ng Pinakamiserableng Babaeng Katha ni Rizal, which we moved from the first day of the festival to the last upon Onna’s request, with the play becoming a good rejoinder to Atom Araullo’s talk regarding writing in dangerous times. [Onna memorized the last page of the play on the day she buried her father!]
How the essayist Rica Bolipata-Santos had to fly home to Manila early in the festival, because her brother, the renowned cellist Chino Bolipata, suddenly died. And then this revealed a strange pattern with her Dumaguete visits over the years: when she was a fellow at the Silliman Writers Workshop in 2010, her father died. When she became a panelist in 2019, someone in her family also died, but she chose to stay for the rest of her week in Dumaguete and kept the news of that death to herself. And now, as a panelist for the literary festival, this recent death of a brother. “Dumaguete does not love me, Ian,” she messaged me after we arranged for her emergency flight back home to Manila. I responded, feebly: “But we do.” How do you respond to this strange happenstance?
Then there was how theatre artist and YATTA stalwart Nikki Cimafranca met a serious motor accident the same week we opened the LitFest—and was in the ICU for days on end, unconscious, with a clot in his brain. [Thank God he has since woken up and is feeling much better.]
Then there was how a few of our LitFest guests, flying home to Manila on the last day of the festival via a certain airline, found themselves in an emergency that necessitated a detour to Iloilo City. One guest in that flight messaged me about how the cabin was a furnace and how everyone was struggling to breath [a baby turned blue!], how the emergency masks dropped from the ceiling in a scene that could only be recalled in movies about plane crashes, and how everyone in the flight were suddenly prayerful and muttering “I love you’s” to each other, getting ready for whatever end might come. Upon landing in Iloilo, my friend chose to fly home in a separate airline from her husband, “just in case.” [Another friend chose to stay in Iloilo City for a few days, in an unplanned vacation.]
It‘s so easy to reduce all these to the simplest catch-all: life is short. But frankly I don’t know what to glean from all these except that in the end, while we deeply mourn the loss of our friends and loved ones, and while we deeply empathize with strange emergencies, ultimately the best of our nature wants us to celebrate our humanity and our art. Like what Onna did. [Which I love her for.]
And sometimes a small dinner with friends, on a relaxed night in a farm, gathered together without any agenda except to foster friendship and camaraderie, can define that celebration.
Labels: death, dinners, dumaguete, friends, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, May 06, 2026
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 290. For Mother's Day.
Labels: mother, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, May 05, 2026
5:55 PM |
All of April
April was one big beautiful madness, from taking part of Iloilo’s National Food Month celebration, to doing the 3rd Duma LitFest, to launching my latest fiction collection, to witnessing Dumaguete being officially designated as UNESCO Creative City of Literature, to being part of UNACOM’s writeshop, and then to doing a week-long book tour in Manila — plus the start of summer school. I am very privileged to have been given a chance to do all of these things. But now, on the sixth day of May, I have finally rested enough to do a bit of introspection. It’s a bit jarring to find myself beholding slower days, but thank God for that. For those of you who were part of my April adventures, thank you for being there. Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, May 03, 2026
7:47 PM |
The Devil Still Wears Prada
Fans of the old movie will either love this, or be indifferent to it. As someone who once had a phase in my life where I’d wake up every morning by playing the opening sequences of the 2006 film, to the tune of “Suddenly I See” by KT Tunstall, I am glad to report that I am of the first variety.
I love this film.
It falls short of the perfection of the first one, but who cares? I like that it basically follows the same beats, but explores a sadder [maybe the better phrase is “more serious”?] narrative, particularly the implosion of journalism as we know it, and the takeover of the world by doofusy techbros who want to destroy everything — which is quite reflective of our 2026 realities. I think that for the seriousness of the subject matter, some might find this film a bit off the mark [or a slight disappointment], given the fact that the first one was really a simpler story about a young girl and her post-collegiate coming-of-age surrounded by high fashion.
But I’m glad that this film chose not to delve into similar territory, choosing instead to highlight what bedevils us today, albeit in a lighter way. [I’m sure that if it didn’t, it would attract brickbats about how tone deaf it is to current realities.] But, people, we need to grow up.
But I like that it chose to do this, yet still forges an organic continuity with the older film: previous betrayals find new avenues for redemption, previous anxieties reveal themselves to be analogous to current anxieties [i.e., people never really change, and Andy is still the same Andy], and old comradeships are deepened by astute revelations that do not contradict how the characters were like in the older iteration. [In this instance, it is Stanley Tucci’s Nigel who becomes the film’s heart.]
I love that fashion is very much alive in this film, I love that Emily shouts at Donatella Versace in Italian, and that Lady Gaga hates Miranda. I love that Miranda’s titular devil is purposefully diminished in this movie [she hangs her own robes! she is careful not to say bad words in meetings lest HR intervenes! she flies coach!] — but finally finds a love in a new husband who seems supportive and unfazed by his wife’s power. I love that she still remains wise about how she can survive the demands and the diminishments of the future, that she still remains the vanguard of the beautiful despite the world becoming ugly.
This is a fantastic continuation to an iconic film.
Labels: fashion, film, review
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, April 29, 2026
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 289.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 288.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 287.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, April 12, 2026
I missed my connecting flight from Iloilo City to Dumaguete via Manila, and rebooking, in this energy crisis, would have cost an arm and two legs. This was bound to happen. I’ve traveled considerably all of my life, both domestic and international, and I have always been on time for every flight, with time to spare—but for some reason, this time around, I misread the “flight time” on my itinerary as “boarding time.” I casually arrived at the counter of Cebu Pacific at the Iloilo Airport, ready to come home to Dumaguete, only to be told that boarding time happened 45 minutes ago, and they had already closed the plane door. There was no chance I was getting on board. What do I do know? I asked the check-in girl, who was in no rush to be empathetic. Buy another ticket for Manila, she said, for a flight scheduled later in the afternoon, and then manage my Manila to Dumaguete flight by rebooking. The thing is, I couldn’t do that, because it wasn’t I who bought my ticket. And again, all these would cost an arm and two legs.
So I opted to do the land trip home, via ferry from Iloilo City to Bacolod, and then the mind-bending six-hour bus trip to Dumaguete. It wasn’t the most comfortable way of getting home, but it certainly was the cheaper option. A part of me was also curiously pragmatic: at least, this way, I’d know the land and sea route from Negros if I wanted to visit Iloilo City again.
I Bonamine’d through the rough seas, and the Oceanjet took about an hour and thirty minutes to cross Guimaras Strait, docking in Bacolod. I immediately flagged down a taxi to take me to South Bus Terminal, in order to catch the next available aircon bus bound for Dumaguete. This part of this trip would take more than six hours, and I wanted to be as comfortable as possible. I toyed with the idea of hiring a car or a van, but the leasing company was asking for seven thousand total for the entire trip—which I understand in the parlance of an energy crisis, but much too much for me to even consider as a viable alternative. In my GC with friends, Ernest told me, “The Ceres bus is comfortable naman.” That gave some comfort. Plus I’ve always loved Ceres buses. As a Negrense, I grew up riding it.
I was lucky to get a good seat in the bus. My body, reeling from the subterfuges of sudden travel changes, was too wired up to even be bothered by the fact that two Pentecostal preachers came one after another to offer visions of fire and brimstone if there was no salvation for us, and then handing out envelopes for charity. I ignored both of them so very thoroughly. I needed sleep, not a promise of flimsy salvation. After almost an hour of marinating in the confines of that bus terminal, we finally felt the movement of the bus moving quickly along half-deserted highways. The energy crisis has a silver lining: no traffic as usual.
I would go back and forth between waking and sleeping while the bus plowed its way down south of the western side of Negros. It was mostly nighttime, and there was only darkness staring at me from my window—so sleep was preferable. I was growing hungry though. I had only eaten one ensaymada while in the pier in Iloilo.
All told, the sea and land route would take about nine hours of my life, but at a thousand pesos in total fares, this was preferable than forking over almost twenty thousand pesos. [P20,000!!!] In that sense, the hassle was not quite a hassle, to be honest. And something else entirely different didn’t make me mind everything at all.
The reason was this: I am endlessly fascinated by the mealtime stopover in Mabinay—always in Mabinay—the halfway point in the mountains between the two Negros capitals. When I go to Bacolod, this happens around lunchtime or maybe in the early afternoon. That night, however, it occurred around half-past 9 PM—and I was already thinking there was to be no such stop and I was already very hungry and I’d eaten all the butterscotch squares that Leny Ledesma, our Iloilo host, had given me. I calculated there were two more hours before arrival in Dumaguete, and my hunger could wait.
But there was a stop, finally! Somewhere in the mountain darkness, the Ceres ground to a halt and I heard the bus driver say, “Manihapon ta!”
I bolted out of my seat to exit and line up at this well-lit carinderia whose existence seems to primarily depend on regular bus loads of hungry people coming its way. It had about fifteen tables for the taking, most of them already occupied. Somehow I remembered the protocol of ordering: at the counter, I pointed at my choices of viands—a plate of two pieces of fried chicken and a plate of bihon—then to another table where the plates of rice were, and I got one serving—then to the refrigerator at the side to grab a sakto Sprite. Having gotten a table shared with another hungry passenger—a girl—I proceeded to eat, and after a while, someone came over to check what I’d gotten, and issued a bill written on a small, green Post-It note: P170.
I was happy and full. “But was it delicious?” someone asked me on Facebook when I recounted all of these in a short post. My answer: my hunger told me it was delicious.
I don’t know why I look forward to these mealtime stopovers on my Ceres trips, because there’s no such thing as taking your pleasurable time to eat, since you have to finish your meal before the conductor and the bus driver finish theirs. It’s also a very simple meal, not even hot—but it does feel to me like some culinary version of an oasis in the desert.
It’s sustenance in the middle of a very long trip.
It’s also a chance to awaken your sleepy legs.
And it’s a moment to reflect, while eating, on the realization that you’re almost home [or near your destination], which is a kind of excitement all its own.
Labels: food, life, negros, travel
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, April 08, 2026
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 286.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, April 07, 2026
10:00 PM |
Baye-Baye Ice Cream!
I knew, coming to Iloilo for the celebration of National Filipino Food Month, that I will be eating a lot. Before coming here, I conditioned myself that whenever I’d be offered something to eat here, it was my duty to say, yes. So yeah, I’ve been having a feast thus far, which is just Iloilo CIty being true to its designation as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy.
But you know what I love so far? The baye-baye ice cream at the Happy Endings ice cream shop near Molo Plaza, which our guides took us to tonight on a spur of the moment, a detour that made my day. Remember the grumpy food critic Anton Ego in the Pixar film Ratatouille when he takes a bite of the titular dish, and gets transported to fond memories of childhood? The exact same thing happened to me. I took one teaspoon of the ice cream, and I was a child again in Bayawan, eating baye-baye.
This was a wonderful treat.Labels: filipino food month, food, iloilo, travel
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, April 01, 2026
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 285.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
7:52 PM |
Floating and Surviving
Last night, at the end of a twelve-hour work day, I was walking home completely floating because of so many things I needed to do and finish, and the anxiety was high. Took me forever to go to sleep, but I think I finally slept knowing that I did what I could given my limitations, and I refused to worry about things beyond my control, e.g., the Middle East crisis, which has been wrecking havoc on our literary fest programming. Sometimes you just need to refuse to worry.
Today, I did not even think about my to-do list. I had one goal: to clean and arrange things in my office at the English Department, which has been just a repository of unpacked boxes, and cobwebs, and dirt. A big win! We don’t have to slay dragons every day [although this one has been a tiny, pesky dragon].Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, March 30, 2026
9:00 AM |
The Return of Silliman Film Open
It has been more than a half a decade since Silliman University—via the College of Mass Communication and the Culture and Arts Council—was able to hold the Silliman Film Open, the university’s festival of student films that used to be the one date every year, usually around February or March, when budding campus filmmakers tried their hand at cinematic storytelling.
Last March 7, we finally unveiled its latest edition—the fifth under its current name. Although if history has to be told, this endeavor started in 2009 as the 61 Film Festival [because it showcased the final film requirements of the students of Communication 61]; and then briefly, beginning in 2012, as the Dumaguete Shorts Festival, where it became a showcase of short films being created by Dumaguete filmmakers [regardless of whether or not they were Sillimanian]; and finally as the Silliman Film Open [or SFO] in 2015, this one designed to be more insular, screening only the works of currently enrolled students. [By then, other schools, like Foundation University, were already offering their own festivals. We had to change course.]
What happened after its fourth iteration sometime in 2018? There were some unfortunate shenanigans I really cannot be bothered to rehash, but ultimately it was really because of the pandemic, which made organizing it an impossibility. Although, truth to tell, COVID-19 had no power over some of SFO’s alumni, the likes of Andrew Alvarez and Ara Mina Amor and Von Adrian Colina, who went on to make fantastic films on their own while the world stood still in quarantine.
I began missing it though.
I missed it the way one would miss a calling. In 2008, I was invited to the Cinemalaya Film Festival at the Cultural Center of the Philippines to take part in its Film Congress, and I was there to represent Dumaguete filmmaking. At that time, I’ve only had one short film to my name, and when I was asked in my panel what the best practices of Dumaguete filmmaking were, I could only say one sad thing: there was no such thing as Dumaguete filmmaking.
Granted, we have our very own Eddie Romero, a renowned National Artist for Film. Granted, we have some filmmakers from here, such as Ramon del Prado, Jonah Lim, and Seymour Barros Sanchez. And granted, Dumaguete seems to be a favorite place to shoot for commercial films. But in terms of grassroots filmmaking, at that time, there was nothing. Hence, no best practice.
But I told the audience at the CCP that perhaps we could start some change, however small. When I got back to Dumaguete, and then to my film class at the College of Mass Communication, I had one resolve: to jumpstart filmmaking in this city, by hook or by crook. There are no filmmakers willing to make films? We will move heaven and earth then—and by “moving heaven and earth,” I mean requiring my film class to go beyond just writing film criticism of the movies they saw in my class. I quoted the French director Jean Luc Godard, who once said: “The only way to critique a movie is to make a movie.” Make a movie, I told my classes. They were scared out of their wits, and they were understandably reluctant—but they did manage to turn out films, which to me were minor miracles borne out of sweat, liters of Red Bull, endless coffee, endless bickering among the crew, sleepless nights, panic attacks, and even minor emotional breakdowns. Then again, who said filmmaking was easy? You have to be insane to set out to make a movie, I told them—but the dividends are fantastic.
And what are the dividends so far? We are now on the fifth iteration of the SFO, and many of the films we’ve exhibited in previous editions have gone on to be included at Lutas Film Festival, at the Sine Negrense, and at the Cinema Rehiyon—and one film, Razceljan Salvarita’s I Am Patience, was actually nominated for the Gawad Urian for Best Short Film. The future could bright for Dumaguete film if we actually create an ecosystem where film practice could be established. It is still a fledgling thing—but at least it shows some signs of thriving. Here’s to this batch of student filmmakers, and may they go places indeed.
The filmmakers behind Silliman Film Open 5, with jury members Andrew Alvarez, Tara De Leon, and Renz Torres, festival director Ian Rosales Casocot, and College of Mass Communication Dean Irma Faith Pal [fourth from right]
For the fifth edition, which we dubbed our “comeback season,” we screened only seven short films of varying genres, which included Karisa Marie Barote’s 404: Self Not Found [a science fiction take], Olivia Anne Cabral’s Girls Next Door [a romantic comedy], Jurielle Cornelia’s After the Silence [a domestic thriller], Ryan Rikaz Ibrahim’s Second Best [a crime film that turned out to be campy comedy], Samuel Lagulao Jr.’s Run on Empty [an actioner], Jullan Louise Sido’s Ang Dili Kahulat [a comedy], and Zschaielle Ainsh Tiglao’s When the Wind Blows [a melodrama]. All of them are students of Communication 62, a directing course, and Literature 30, a course on film and literature. [Three other filmmakers, unfortunately, were not able to make the deadline for the festival.]
In the end, the jury composed of local filmmakers Andrew Alvarez, Tara De Leon, and Renz Torres, gave generously and selected a wide swath of titles for awards, including Best Poster to After the Silence; Best Original Song to Le John’s “Naiilang” for Ang Dili Kahulat; Best Production Design to Olivia Cabral’s work in Girls Next Door; Best Make-up Design to Ryan Rikaz Ibrahim and Kessiya Silva for Second Best; Best Cinematography to Ben Guarin, Jeff Jamolod, and Roll Borres for Run on Empty; Best Editing to Angelina Rival for Second Best; and Best Screenplay to Samuel Lagulao Jr. for Run on Empty.
The award for Best Supporting Actress went to Franz Tolentino for Second Best. Ryan Rikaz Ibrahim, who directed that film, won Best Supporting Actor for another film, 404: Self Not Found. That film also garnered Best Actor for Vince Gerard Balbuena, while Best Actress went to Kessiya Silva for Second Best. Jurielle Cornelio was named Best Director for After the Silence, and a Jury Award was given to Zschaielle Ainsh Tiglao’s When the Wind Blows. Ryan Rikaz Ibrahim’s Second Best was finally named Best Film. All in all, a happy ending for a film festival no one thought would make a comeback in 2025!
It was a journey—painstaking and demanding—for all of them.
Samuel Lagulao, for example, is a Creative Writing major, and he had no inkling that the semester that just passed would require him to make a short film. “My fourth year as a graduating student was already heavy with thesis work, my mythology class, and other subjects, but this [film class] was the hardest for me,” he wrote. “The whole experience taught me a great deal, not only about writing itself, but also about the publishing and marketing side of it. Making a film forced me into a different kind of education to what you would normally expect from literary and creative writing classes, one that had less to do with words and more to do with logistics and money and weather and scheduling and accepting the limits of what could actually be done… In film work, [I learned that] talent is important but reliability [on my crew] also matters just as much. A project can survive a lot of limitations, but it struggles when people cannot be there.
He continued: “There were moments when I wanted the camera to hide too much, or the edit to fix problems that should have been solved in the actual shoot, with one scene especially that made that clear when I had wanted to make it look as though a conversation was happening naturally, even though it would really be stitched together from separate footage of people performing against empty space. On paper, that seemed possible. In practice, it was not convincing enough … That was one of the hardest lessons the process taught me. Writing can make almost anything happen because the page is obedient. Film is not. Film depends on bodies, places, light, timing, weather, equipment, and the availability of other people. The actors could not always make it. Some shoots had to be rearranged because one person was free and another was not. One day was cancelled because of the weather. The easiest scene [to shoot] turned out to be the one inside a classroom, probably because it was controlled and contained. Everything else felt exposed to interruption.
“… Now that the film is finished, I remember the strain of it but I also see it more clearly for what it was. It was one of the few times in my student life when I had to move beyond writing something good on paper and face the mess of making something real with other people. … It was tense, expensive, and often frustrating but it also taught me what kind of work filmmaking really is. [But] I am grateful that the process was not smooth since it forced me to understand that a film is never built by imagination alone. It is built through people and limits and corrections and persistence.”
A scene from Samuel Lagulao Jr.'s Run on Empty, which won Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography
For Ryan Rikaz Ibrahim, winner of the top award, joining the festival—and making the film—was a humbling experience. “The most difficult stage was getting the screenplay approved,” he admitted. “… My early drafts were met with strong criticism, [and] at one point, the feedback was direct: the story needed to be rewritten or reframed, because it did not make sense. As someone who was confident in my writing, hearing this was difficult. Each revision felt like going back to the beginning, and the process slowly chipped away at my confidence.”
There were other production challenges, like scheduling the shoot with actors, or even finalizing something as primary as having a cinematographer in place. “But slowly, things began to fall into place,” Ryan said, and then a lot of learning had to be done when shooting commenced. “One moment during filming stood out in particular. While shooting the interrogation scene, the entire team began contributing ideas to improve the sequence. The actors, the videographer, and even I, as the director, experimented with different angles, deliveries, and approaches to the scene. What started as a simple shot turned into a collaborative effort, and that moment reminded me that filmmaking is truly a shared creative process.”
But for him, the real turning point came in the post-production phase. “When my editor, Angelina Rival, sent the first draft of the film, I immediately felt something had changed. The scenes were arranged in a way that matched the vision I had imagined from the beginning. Her work with camera angles, pacing, and sound design brought the story to life in ways I could not have achieved alone. At that moment, the film I had struggled with for weeks finally started to feel real.”
When Ryan’s film was announced as the top winner, he was “genuinely stunned.” He said: “In that moment, it became clear that the victory was never mine alone. It belonged to my actors who poured their energy into every scene, to my editor who shaped the film with remarkable creativity, and to my entire team that helped transform a difficult idea into a finished story. [But] looking back, this entire process taught me the value of humility, perseverance, and openness to criticism. There were times when every correction felt discouraging, and every revision felt like starting over. Yet those moments of struggle slowly revealed an important truth: growth often happens in the most uncomfortable situations. More than anything, I learned that filmmaking is not just about having a vision. It is about trusting the people who help bring that vision to life and allowing yourself to grow through the process.”
A scene from Ryan Rikaz Ibrahim's Second Best, which won Best Film
Filmmaking as a metaphor for processing life. I hope that’s one good lesson instilled with fervor in our current crop of campus filmmakers who made Silliman Film Open 5 happen. Congratulations, everyone!
A scene from Jurielle Cornelia's After the Silence, which won Best Director
A scene from Zschaielle Ainsh Tiglao's When the Wind Blows, which won the Jury Award
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, film, silliman
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, March 28, 2026
6:35 PM |
Winging It [Long Version]
At one of my lowest depths in the days of the pandemic, when I was struggling mentally to just live through each day, I was tasked to teach a writing workshop for [bleep]. This was before I was diagnosed, by the way, and was properly medicated. [Or was this after I was diagnosed, but quit medication for more than a year because I thought I didn’t “really” need it? Who knows.]
But I accepted the challenge of a workshop, because the organizer is a very good friend, and I believed in the project. And the project paid. Anything that paid in the pandemic was a good thing. The thing was, the date of the event did not even sink into my consciousness, nor the brief. I forgot all about it.
Eve of the first day, I was reminded by my friend that the whole thing was starting the very next morning. Fine, I said. I can wing it. That next day, on the way to the venue, I realized it was to be a writing class with regional languages in mind. Fine, I can wing it, I thought. I’ve taught a workshop on writing in Binisaya before, anyway. But then when I was finally facing the participants, I realized that they came from all over the Philippines, and Bisaya would not be the primary language of most of them.
Dear God, I don’t know how I got through those three days just winging it—but I did. And actually did supremely well, and their final activity, which involved a performance of some sort, was a highlight of the closing program. We even made a zine of their outputs! How did I do that? I have no recollection whatsoever. I winged it.
But I will never recommend doing the same thing—winging it—to anyone. I think I was just lucky I had stock knowledge to impart, and a well-spring of bravado and guts. I can start talking, and talk for hours. I can make people do activities on the fly, and somehow string them all together in the end to create a kind of wonderful synthesis.
What I do remember most about those three days is not the teaching of that workshop but the strange elasticity of the self under pressure. Of how it stretches to meet the moment, and how it becomes a version of itself that seems, in retrospect, almost comically fictional. Because I look back at that person that I was—the one who stood in that room at the university library, which was humming with air-conditioning, fluorescent lighting, and low-grade anxiety—and I do not fully recognize him, to be honest. Here is the truth I rarely admit: I have always relied on winging it, even before the pandemic made that improvisational instinct feel like a survival mechanism. Teaching, writing, and living … these have often been acts of performance for me, of stepping onto a stage with only the barest outline of a script, and trusting that language, that old unreliable friend, will arrive … just … in time. Sometimes it does, which is great. But sometimes it leaves you stranded mid-sentence, grasping for coherence.
In that long ago workshop, though, something else happened. The participants, who were tentative at first, gradually bloomed into confidence, and began to take ownership of the space I provided even with my winging it. They spoke and wrote in their own regional languages, and in the cadences of their own homes, and what began as a logistical nightmare for me transformed into something almost magical. I understood that we did not need a single language to understand one another, not Tagalog, not English. We needed only attention, that rarest of currencies. We listened to poems in Hiligaynon. We responded to stories in Bicolano. We made do with what we can in works written in Waray. Somehow, we all understood what we were all trying to do, and appreciated the effort.
But I think now that what saved me from utterly failing that time was not bravado, not really, but the quiet discipline of having done the work before. Years of reading, of writing sentences that did not quite work until they did, of standing in front of classrooms and learning how to read a room … these had all sedimented into something like instinct for me. The truth is, when the mind falters, the body often remembers, at least for me. So when panic threatens to take over, I find that my habits can step in and say: “Just begin.”
There is, of course, a danger in romanticizing “winging it.” My story tempts you to conclude that crisis reveals hidden strengths, that we are at our best when cornered. Nah. This is only partly true. And dangerously so. For every story like mine, there are countless others where the strain breaks something essential, where winging it leads not to triumph but to quiet collapse.
I was really just lucky. Luck, I have come to understand, is both circumstance and timing. It comes at the moment when your accumulated fragments of knowledge align just enough to carry you through. But, mind you, luck should never be a strategy. It is not something you can depend on all the time. Not if you care about your own well-being.
But on the whole, I was winging it because I was mentally flailing. And one needs to understand that one needs to seek help if one feels like flailing, like a bad storm, in life. Especially if you have undiagnosed mental health issues. When I say this, I do not mean this statement as a moral injunction or a tidy lesson. I mean it as a practical acknowledgment of limits. There are just things we cannot improvise our way out of. There are battles that require more than instinct and accumulated skill. There are days when the self does not stretch. We can fray, trust me. We need help.
And yet, even now, I still do wing it actually. I actually think this is how Dumagueteños do things all the time, winging it. Last Sunday, for example, we gave outgoing Silliman University President Betty McCann a tribute and a farewell in a program filled with speeches and outstanding performances. True, the group that planned it met once or twice. And true, we did our utmost to get the best people to do the talking and to do the singing and the dancing and the instrument-playing. But we rehearsed just once at 1 PM that same Sunday, straight on until 3:15 PM. Then open house at the Luce at 3:30 PM, with the final program beginning at 4 PM. And it turned out to be a beautiful, beautiful show.
But we were winging it.
Perhaps winging it for me, and for Dumagueteños in general, will never change. But there is a difference, I think, between winging it alone and winging it with the knowledge that there are structures in place to catch you when you fall. There’s medication, there’s therapy, there’s friendship, and there’s the slow and deliberate work of understanding yourself.
That long-ago workshop remains as a kind of minor miracle for me. This is not because I performed well in the end, but because it showed me both the resilience and the fragility of the person I was becoming. It taught me that survival, like writing, is often a matter of revision: we return to the page, to the self, and trying again, this time with a little more care.
So, please, seek help if you feel like you’re flailing and cannot wing it anymore. I finally sought help a few years ago, and my life has been better because of it. [Although I still mostly wing it with life, to be honest.]
Warlito and I winging it for the tribute for Ma'am Betty the other Sunday.
Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 284.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
I was walking home just now. The streets, although well-lit, were mostly empty because it was midnight. I found myself walking right behind a young woman, who looked like she worked as a nurse at the nearby hospital. The sidewalk was wide and also empty, but I found myself crossing the street, to walk in the same direction but on the other side. It was a subconscious thing that I did, and there really was no reason to. But a thought came to me later that I wanted to avoid being a possibly menacing presence for this woman, just because I was a man walking right behind her. Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, March 22, 2026
I’ve calculated my 50-year-old body’s response to stress now, and I think I need at least a week between events to fully recover and commit. I had two two-day workshops for the past two weeks, wrapping up with a grand tour on Thursday. Rested for two days. And then I had a directing stint today, started rehearsing at 1 PM for a 4 PM show that lasted three hours, and now I’m in bed, dead tired, and laughing at how pooped I am. But it was a beautiful show, and I was glad to do it.Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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