Many people who know me don’t know about a time in my life when I wandered the streets of Manila aimlessly. They usually happen during the later hours of the night, in the most unlikely corners of the city. During these walks I have met boys and young men from various backgrounds, in the midst of their own walking, living, existing. Surprisingly, despite our differences in age, class, sexuality, and regional roots, I have forged meaningful bonds with many of them, even though some of these friendships were too fleeting. Some of them brought me face-to-face with danger I would gladly leave behind in the past, while some have kept in touch with warmth and affection to this day. These encounters form the spiritual core of this film.

This act of walking—in search of desires that were new and foreign to me then—led me to discover my own queer identity. But it also introduced me to the capital city as a common destination for those who seek a new life: Manila as a meeting point for a variety of desires. And so these nights felt like a confluence of being in touch with my sexual awakening, and also my own feelings of displacement. I may live a different life compared to these strangers but there are things in our lives that connect us in the dark of night as if in some profound and spiritual way: leaving our respective homes from the province only to search for home in a city that we feel we may never belong to. 

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The subjects at the forefront of our story are young male street hustlers. The story of the city’s cruisers and street hustlers can never be told without its villain: the police. In the Philippines, there is no legal basis that prohibits the male prostitute to do his trade; our law only defines prostitution as a female-only profession. And so the police find alternative means to detain the male prostitute, mostly for vagrancy, but never pursuing charges that could keep them locked in their jail cells. In May 2016,  a strongman dictator became our president. Instead of keeping true to his promise of ‘change’—to clear the streets of crime in his first six months—Rodrigo Duterte launched a war against drugs and ordered the police to kill. These extra-judicial killings (EJKs)—there are reported to be 7,000 in the first six months alone—targeted only the poor. When once the police danced around the law to make their abuses, now they were given permission to be above it. Their shoot-to-kill operations left the streets with bloodied corpses of the disenfranchised. Some of these victims aren’t even part of the drug trade, their unjust deaths only meant to contribute to the police’s quota. As this happened, I thought about those young men whose homelessness have left them to live on the streets. That these same people are one of the most vulnerable to these police operations. Manila has become a dangerous arena where even its youth aren’t excluded from EJKs. 

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There have been a number of Filipino films made that recreated the physical realities of Duterte’s war on drugs. But what I want to express in this story is the kind of collective grief my country has been experiencing for so long. And offer proof that there is a sliver of light that exists in the darkness of Manila nighttime. There are unusual friendships formed along these dangerous streets. There is solidarity in honoring someone’s death by finding their home no matter what. I want to offer another version of our reality by showing the kind of human connection I know exists and still persists. 

The visual approach is a spiritual portrait of a city and its people. Employing characteristics of the road movie, this film is an exploration and meditation on socio-political spaces, covering the thickening peripheral expanse of overcrowded slums, pockets of privilege and leisure, and the neighboring underdeveloped provincial towns. Attached to Zion’s every move, the camera and the audience experience his own mystery, confusion and self-discoveries. Deep-focus photography and immersive sound will bring to life the verve of Manila and provincial nightscapes, capturing the youths’ clandestine spaces and secret lives. I want to capture life for my invisible characters – including myself and all the people I’ve met during my walks – to be truly made visible.