Feature – Philippines / World Première

Showing @ Filmhouse 3, Sun 24 Jun @ 17.10 & Cineworld 13, Wed 27 Jun @ 20.10

Emerson Reyes / Philippines / 2012 / 90 min

The modern businessperson’s lifestyle: rushed, gruelling and isolated. It’s commonplace for earphones to outnumber people on public transport today, signalling at best our need for greater privacy but at worst our hyper-introversion. This boundary issue is something captured with awkward delicacy by Emerson Reyes as taxi driver Ramil travels to and from Manila, ferrying business folk while searching for a long lost love.

The beauty of this film is, ironically, its monotonous composition. In this sense, it’s almost like Ricky Gervais’ The Office crossed with Pablo Giorgelli’s Las Acacias. People get in, people get out. Sometimes they argue, sometimes they flirt. Almost all of the film is shot inside Ramil’s car, offering an intensely private yet wide-angle window into the heart of diversity in Manila. Ramil is caught up in the mechanical nature of his job but is given access to the most spontaneous moments of comedy and drama. As viewers, we’re offered enough of the characters’ lives to yearn for more without tiring of them. It works so well because we make our own back-stories; we picture what a stressed mother’s home life might be like or what two students might get up to at night. While some moments are of course more interesting than others, Reyes pitches a captivating, sometimes heartbreaking, shufti into a bustling Philippine society.