It was the summer of ’96, an ordinary Sunday. Sunlight streamed through the jalousies in the kitchen, when my sister, Guia, dropped the Inquirer on the table. 

“What?” I said.

“This,” she replied, pointing at an ad in the paper. 

There was a penguin, foot up in mid-dance, announcing the Experimental Animation Workshop in Mowelfund. We both loved weird animation, growing up with Betamax tapes our parents rented so we wouldn’t bother them. Some of which, in hindsight, we shouldn’t have watched at such a young age. 

“Basta cartoons yan, pwede yan sa kanila!” said Sonya, the woman behind the counter at a dinky stall in Broadway Centrum. 

And so began both our jubilant and horrifying education through Watership Down, Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, Fire and Ice, The Black Cauldron, Charlotte’s Web, Animal Farm, The Last Unicorn, Fantastic Planet, Yellow Submarine, and the first puppet live-action film, The Dark Crystal. We loved all of it. The weirder, the better. 

Me being me, I read the fine print. 

“There are limited slots, and a talent test. We’ve never made a film. What makes you think we’ll get in?” I said, the eternal pessimist, or realist, as I’d like to believe.

“We can just try?” Guia said.

“But we don’t have the money,” I argued. Our parents had split up, so Mom and Lola Nena covered the essentials, but anything extra, we had to earn. 

“Then we bake more cookies,” she said with finality. She had a cookie business, which involved her mixing the batter (her secret recipe), and my waking up at 5 in the morning to bake.

“Fine,” I said begrudgingly. And that was that. 

A few weeks later, we were at the talent test. It was hot, sticky, and humid, and despite everyone fanning themselves, hair sticking to their foreheads, Mowelfund was abuzz. People of all ages filled the room, chatting excitedly about how they hoped they’d get in, what films they loved, and what they wanted to make. I was nervous and thrilled. We were both in UP, I was in Film, and Guia was in Art Studies, but we’d never been in a room with so many kinds of people from different backgrounds, all passionate about one thing. Film. 

We didn’t know anybody, and were a little lost, but we were greeted by the smiles of Ricky Orellana and Ellen Ramos, and we quickly calmed down. We took the tests in a dark, musty, airconditioned room with moth-eaten drapes. It consisted of a self-introduction, a story we needed to write on the spot, and drawing our ideas unto paper.  Leaving the room, I thought I didn’t have a shot. My drawing skills were rudimentary at best, and my ideas were strange. I thought, what the hell, let them know who I am and how I see, if they see something, then so be it.

As each day passed, we anticipated the results. The drive of Mowel was that you could only learn filmmaking by making films, mentored by industry stalwarts. Getting in felt like a one-in-a-million chance, and when the day of the results finally came, Guia made the call.  All I could hear was her mumbling, her ahhs and umms, yeses and okays. Her face was stern when she closed the receiver.

“There’s only one slot left,” she said. The films were to be made on 16mm, and they were shouldering most of the costs, so the number of slots were final.

“So, I didn’t get in?” 

“No, we both passed, but there’s only one slot left,” she reiterated.

“So, you take it. You’re the one who really wanted this. It’s fine.”

“No, they said we could share the slot. You and I can make one film.”

“So, we got it?”

She nodded, and I leapt up and embraced her. We were shrieking, jumping, and laughing. We were making a film!

The next few weeks were a blur, meeting new friends, going to the lectures of Neil Daza, Robert Quebral, Regiben Romana, watching Švankmajer, Brothers Quay, Stan Brakhage, Len Lye, and Norman McLaren, learning to use a Bolex, load the film in the dark, light a set, filling our brains with all sorts of possibilities. 

Our first exercise was on cut-out stop-motion animation, and we were tasked to bring any sort of material that we wanted. Our Tito had loads of 70s Playboy magazines stashed away at the bottom of the closet that we figured he wouldn’t miss, mixed with a number of old National Geographics, so we brought them all. It resulted in an orgy of legs, breasts, lips, and landscapes, all rolled into one. It hardly made any sense, but it was fun. It was freedom. 

After that, Ricky and Ellen announced that it was time to make our films. We needed to make scripts and storyboards, and present these to the Director, Nick de Ocampo. Through whispers, we heard he was sharp and ruthless. He’d go through your concept with a knife, cut-off any loose ends, and eat it for dinner. If he thought your work was bad, you’d have to start from scratch, so everyone was on edge.

Guia had ideas for the film, and I didn’t have any, so we decided that she would be the director. She knew what she wanted but wasn’t sure. She asked me what I thought.

“Doesn’t great art come from pain? I think it does because you can’t help but be honest.”

She went to her drafting table and worked well into morning. When I woke up, she was done. We both loved stop-motion puppet animation, so that’s what she boarded. She asked me about a scene, which involved a doll scratching her chest so much that it opened up and revealed her heart. 

“How are we supposed to construct a heart?” she said. We wanted it anatomically correct since that captured the feeling. Then it hit me.

“We don’t need to create a heart. We can buy a pig’s heart from the palengke and animate that!” She loved it.

So, armed with all the passion and bravado two budding filmmakers could muster, we prepared our presentation for Nick. It was a one-on-one session with him in his office, and people who left his room were either ecstatic or forlorn. When it was our turn, he just listened. We explained every scene, down to the materials we’d use and the kind of lighting we’d employ. And at the end of the presentation, he only had one question.

“Why doesn’t your doll have nipples?”

“Because she’s a doll,” Guia said.

“We can add nipples,” I quickly added.

“Okay, approved,” he said. And we quickly left his office in a daze. 

Ricky, Ellen, and the rest of our classmates were waiting outside and asked us how it went. When we told them we were approved, they rained high fives and hugs, and all of us quickly went to work. 

The months that followed were about building sets, gathering props, sculpting the dolls, and animating. Guia did the sculpting, I did the lighting, we did the animating. There were times that we were so in sync that we forgot to count time for the camera, animating for hours and hours not knowing that we had run out of film. We would just laugh about it because we didn’t care. Animating was too much fun, so we didn’t mind doing it all over again. But as the months progressed, Guia started getting tired. She’d take breaks on the set to sleep while I continued animating. We both lost weight since our schedule was so grueling, so we thought nothing of it until she found a lump. 

In between production, she got a biopsy, and we found out that she had cancer. It was stage 4. 

Our rushes arrived from the lab, and she insisted that we see it together. Ricky opened the studio on a Sunday just so we could do it. We loaded the film on the Steinbeck and flicked the switch. And there she was. It had come alive. We called her Maya, the Goddess of Illusion. 

Guia couldn’t edit with me since she was in and out of treatment. She said that since I was doing all of post, that I be co-director of the film. She made me promise that no matter what, I must finish it. Despite her sickness, she’d come to the studio to see the edit and make copious notes. We finished it together. We watched as it premiered together, hand in hand. Guia passed away after that.

Ricky and Ellen submitted and distributed the film for us, and it won in Gawad Alternatibo that year. It showed in Message to Man, Russia, Mediawave, Hungary, and Clermont-Ferrand, France.

I miss Guia still. I wonder what other films we would have made together. But she left me with this. The experience of first love. My first.