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An airplane flies past an anonymous Zamboanga cemetery. Outside the city's airport, reporters are waiting. Passengers from the most recent arrival scramble out of the airport. A man, donned in running gear, is approached by the reports. He won a prestigious marathon in Manila and returns to his native Zamboanga to start running across the island of Mindanao. While the reporters are gathering clues from the runner as to why he wants to run, another man (Alfred Vargas), dressed in typical Manila clothes, appears. The runner, who is still being followed by the reporters, and the man leave the airport in separate directions.   Zurich Chan, instead of following the possibly more colourful tale of the champion runner, follows the other man, as he...

When a film is described as poetic, it is often taken as a compliment. However, when a film is described as theatrical, it is seen as a critique, scathing at that. What makes poetry the better spouse to cinema? Isn't cinema but a visual and aural interplay of poetry and theater to begin with? Theater provides the cornerstones: the narrative, the milieu, the setting and the characters. Poetry, on the other hand, more than the façade and the flourishes, provides the requisite subtlety in the execution --- the minute gestures that accentuate a character, that last five seconds of absolute silence before a cut, the symbols, the verses, the rhymes, and rhythms. This is purely hypothetical. But if films are judged based on a balance where theatricality is measured with poetry, and the former outweighs the latter by a large margin, does it mean that the film is better off staged than filmed?...