Lé Baltar

1 week ago | philstarlife.com | Lé Baltar

In its earliest iteration, The Trans Actor, a project wrestling with the lived experiences of trans performers in Philippine film and theater, was a documentary film, training the camera on its creators, Serena Magiliw and Zoë de Ocampo, but the two lacked the deep pockets needed for the project’s fruition. “I started doing interviews with Zoë, so lumalabas-labas kami from time to time, tapos pera ko (ang) gamit,” says Magiliw over Zoom.

1 week ago | movieswetextedabout.com | Lé Baltar

At times it’s best to encounter a movie as a blank slate, even for film critics like me who have never been put off by any ounce of spoilers. If anything, there’s a different kind of pleasure that arises from experiencing something for the first time, and it’s often ambrosial and intoxicating. That’s partly true about The Rose: Come Back to Me, Eugene Yi’s documentary movie that just had its world premiere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

1 week ago | philstarlife.com | Lé Baltar

Over three decades since its premiere, French playwright Yasmina Reza’s acclaimed comedy Art, later translated by British playwright Christopher Hampton, is being revived by Repertory Philippines (REP) as the second production of the theater company’s 88th season. The Philippine restaging is directed by Victor Lirio, who helmed REP’s adaptation of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal last season.

1 week ago | movieswetextedabout.com | Lé Baltar

After working on their respective short films and co-directing the documentary short Dollar Pizza Documentary, Brooklyn-based filmmakers Travis Wood and Alex Mallis are upping the ante as their debut feature The Travel Companion is having its world premiere in the US Narrative Competition section of the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival. The movie, as with most first-time features, acts as a glimpse into the directing duo’s personal lores.

2 weeks ago | movieswetextedabout.com | Lé Baltar

In Cuerpo Celeste, the symbolically loaded debut feature from Chilean writer-director Nayra Ilic García, the past not only fractures the present and future but actively exists along with it as if they are all one and the same. The film explores that threshold, the possibility to re-encounter even something we have yet to experience, in search of some kind of transcendence for its protagonist and, by extension, its director. But the story’s provenance is hardly abstract.