Meet the film’s director Nick Olanka.

Roaming around deserted Quiapo streets at night, the impressive opening long-take that accompanies the police car driven by the two main characters serves as an aesthetic manifesto.

Contrasting with the rage and the ever-buzzing chaos of Brillante Mendoza’s urban jungles, the city the young filmmaker Nick Olanka is unveiling to us in this tracking shot breathes at a different rhythm. A slow-paced tempo that seems, as the film progresses, to affect both the characters’ movements and motives as much as the story itself, diluted in the disquieting stillness of night.

Modernist and daring in its storytelling, the plot is however stripped to its core, focusing all the viewer’s attention and emotions towards one single character, a police officer whose goal, throughout nightshifts that ultimately end up all looking the same, is to find her lost boy. Or, to put it more simply, it is the story of a woman desperately trying to retrieve the meaning of her life.

Event: The film will be followed by a Q&A with the director Nick Olanka.

Director: Nick Olanka (Philippines, 2014)
With: Ai-Ai de las Alas, Perla Bautista, Bernardo Bernardo
75 min. English subtitles.