Gym Lumbera

Anak Araw

Gym Lumbera

Jay G De la Vega, John Griffiths

A local albino is searching for his identity. Believing that he is the son of an American, he tries to learn English through reading translations and definitions from a Tagalog-English dictionary.

Piding

Gym Lumbera, Paolo Picones

Once upon a time, you were born. In the Philippines, there was no science education when you were a child. When they began to offer it in your adulthood, you leapt at the chance and studied harder than everyone else. You learned of kingdoms and species and genes and atoms. Science helped you to see the bigger world beyond. You studied so well, an American university paid you to keep studying with them, so you left. You gained mastery over the evolution of birds there, but you missed home the whole time. You lost your first wife and son to Science. So with degree in hand, you went back to your people. You found that they had burned their forests, and had exploded their seas. So you gave a new bird to your people; because, now you knew how to use it to save them. This was the piding. And the rest is the story of Oliver Carlos.

Dahil sa'yo

Gym Lumbera

Rener Concepcion

Gym Lumbera’s Dahil Sa’yo situates its melancholic romance between an old man and a banana tree set in the director’s native Batangas. Lyrically shot, sparingly paced, and thematically succinct, the short film makes use of very relatable human emotions as expressed through the popular ballad sung by the old man to his beloved tree to depict the despair in humanity’s relationship with his environment.

Taglish

Gym Lumbera

Dado Javier, Loleng Hernandez-Javier

At first, there was Tagalog, Gym Lumbera’s short and, to his mind, unfinished narrative about the infidelity that comes between a husband and wife in their twilight years, shot on film and reflecting his own real-life infidelity.. And then there was a storm, a real storm and not a metaphorical one, that flooded his house and submerged, and subsequently damaged, the only copy of Tagalog. This damaged version, entitled English, became the missing piece that completed the film. The new work is named after Taglish, the bastard hybrid, some say corruption, of Tagalog and English, and has become a meditation on love and language and the ways in which we betray and destroy them.

Estimated Time of Arrival

Raya Martin, Gym Lumbera

Gym Lumbera, Raya Martin

A nursery rhyme hovers over shadowy fragments of time, of arrivals and departures and the illusion of passage they evoke.