It feels only fitting that Maris Racal finally lands a titular role in a film directed by Antoinette Jadaone.
After all, Sunshine, the sole Philippine entry in the Centrepiece section at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), is already their third project together, following previous collaborations in The Kangks Show and Simula Sa Gitna, both made for television.
Racal was ecstatic at the news of the film making the selection, Jadaone tells me, although at first she couldn’t wrap her head around how huge a film festival TIFF is. “But when we provided her a background about TIFF and what its impact will be on Sunshine, it brought her more joy and excitement,” says the director in a mix of English and Filipino.
The Toronto premiere was held over a month ago. Now, the film sets its sights on the international film festival circuit before a local release next year. “That is, if MTRCB [Movie and Television Review and Classification Board] allows us to be shown here,” notes Jadaone, who spoke with me recently about the long road to putting the film to the screen.
It’s a well-known fact that Jadaone, in many occasions, has directed her muses to great acclaim, from Lilia Cuntapay in Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay, her debut feature, to Angelica Panganiban in That Thing Called Tadhana, to Nadine Lustre in Never Not Love You, and to Charlie Dizon in Fan Girl.
It’s been four years as well since Jadaone made a film she both wrote and directed, and what better way to make her comeback on the silver screen than with Racal, who has worked steadily and tirelessly over the years to become one of the most promising actors of her generation.
Sans major film acting awards, Racal has always been the kind of performer who succeeds to pump life into the array of characters, however small, she has played onscreen, even in films that are confined by its script or lack of imagination, say Chris Martinez’s Here Comes the Groom (which got her a supporting nod at last year’s Summer Metro Manila Film Festival), or Quark Henares’s Marupok AF (Where Is The Lie?).
Jadaone attests to this display of commitment, after having been acquainted with Racal “as an actress, an artist, and a person” in The Kangks Show and Simula sa Gitna.
“At her young age, she has maturity in portraying different characters,” Jadaone says of her lead, “and the care, attention, and thoughtfulness she extends to the roles she takes on is remarkable. It’s more than a side job for her. She really studies it; she disappears into the character. She’s comfortable with being vulnerable.”
The director lets the actor read the script. “She came back to me after a few days [and told me] she’s game. She cried over the script,” says the director.
But before Jadaone made her decision, she asked Racal to really think through it. “Because it’s important for me that the actor playing Sunshine believes in what the film wants to say. Because Sunshine should not just exist in this script. And that’s the weight she’ll carry when she finally takes on Sunshine.”
Jadaone is particular about this not only as a director but as a screenwriter who works on her material sans the burden of an actor in mind, save for projects commissioned by Star Cinema or Viva Films —major local studios whose filmmaking and marketing chiefly bank on the star system.
“Because if I already think of the artist before writing, I would be limited,” shares Jadaone. “It’s better if I completed the script with a complete character, then we’d look for the perfect artist for the role. It’s the artist who adjusts to the script, not the other way around.”
So began Racal’s process of studying and mulling over the material. Then, a few weeks later, she came out of it no longer herself — but as Sunshine, a young gymnast left distraught by an unwanted pregnancy en route to her Olympic dream, a story that finds a cardinal point through a predominantly pro-life Philippines, where women seeking abortion resort to precarious methods.
Jadaone first worked on Sunshine in 2020, a year after another title in the works, Boldstar, which takes a stab at painting the sweeping appeal of the soft porn genre in the Philippines, won at the 22nd Asian Project Market in Busan, South Korea. A title under Project 8 Projects, Boldstar named Angelica Panganiban, Racal’s co-star in The Kangks Show, as the film’s lead.
“The germ [of Sunshine] came after I watched [Taika Waititi’s] Jojo Rabbit where a kid imagined a fictitious Hitler into life,” Jadaone reveals. “I wanted to access chaos, the confusion in the mind of a pregnant teenage girl whose life is just about to begin. What if there is a tangible representation of the otherwise abstract but very visual chaos in her mind?”
Jadaone situates this vexing question smack dab in what she describes the “Manila of the here and now,” particularly in the “irony around Quiapo Church,” which functions not only as a prominent figure of Catholic faith in the country but also as a site of abject precarity in the metropolis.
“Filipinos flock to this church, but it is also where women go to buy abortion drugs from the dozens of stalls that surround it. This is the Manila where Sunshine lives. It is not just a milieu but a character, both Sunshine’s friend and foe,” she says.
“When I was doing my research in Quiapo,” she continues “one prominent imagery is a stall selling Mother Mary statues, rosaries, and scapulars. It is the same stall that is also selling ‘pamparegla’ (illegal abortion cocktail). There are some who even wear Nazarene or Mother Mary shirts while selling, so they’re really devotees. The irony! But that’s what makes Quiapo the colorful character that it is. It is a story, a statement as it is.”
But of course this observation, penetrating as it is, would not suffice for the microcosmic conceit she intends to forge. So she proceeded with further legwork, even until actual filming, and sat down with devout Catholics, agnostics, mothers, nongovernmental organizations, and rights advocates including the Philippine Safe Abortion Advocacy Network (PINSAN), and muscled all the insights she gathered into the material to extend her character “the right care.”
Recounts Jadaone, “About 500 Filipino teenagers become mothers every day. At least three Filipina women die every day from unsafe abortion. Some of these women who became pregnant as a result of rape — a Filipino woman or girl is raped every 75 minutes — were forced to carry their pregnancies to term and died.”
“The abortion ban may be protecting the unborn, but it’s killing our women too — both literally and figuratively,” she laments.
What’s animating the film further is the sports aspect, which by perfect coincidence rides the country’s Olympic high after Carlos Yulo copped a historic double gold in Paris last August. It is a plot detail that warrants separate but necessary research.
So, in the course of writing, Jadaone reached out to the Gymnastics Association of the Philippines under which Racal, alongside national gymnasts, trained for nearly a year, on top of working on other projects.
She worked closely with coaches Whynn Reroma and Dannah Sabio to develop and learn by heart two major routines that her Sunshine had to pull off, including one in the film’s coda — some sort of explosion of pent-up feelings. “That dance in the finale was crucial,” notes Jadaone. “I cannot help but cry when I watch the routine on screen.”
But past the material’s development, what loomed large in Jadaone’s thinking was the cost of making the film – around five million pesos.
As the director put it to me, they were about to call off production were it not for the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP), which offered them a grant to begin filming. Other outfits like Happy Infinite Productions and Cloudy Duck Pictures also provided the film with more funding. Through the FDCP, Sunshine then participated in the First Cut Lab Philippines, an editing lab initiated by Matthieu Darras. There it was fine-tuned by editing mentors Suzy Gillet and Agnieska Glinska.
Hurdles such as this may, in part, illuminate why Sunshine is a huge juncture in Jadaone’s filmic oeuvre as well as Racal’s. It is in fact their first “big five” film festival, as Toronto’s reputation stands alongside Venice, Cannes, Berlin, and Sundance in the international film festival circuit.
Too bad, though, that Racal was nowhere in sight when Sunshine made its debut in Toronto last September. At the time, she was set to depart for Italy for the filming of her upcoming action series Incognito under ABS-CBN, days after wrapping up filming for And the Breadwinner Is…, Jun Lana’s entry, top-billed by Vice Ganda, to this year’s MMFF.
Speaking of packed schedule, Racal also shot Sunshine, on top of romance series Can’t Buy Me Love, another ABS-CBN project that concluded in May this year.
Be that as it may, this meeting of two worlds flaunts perfect timing. And perhaps all Racal ever needs is a material that knows how to reward her talent with range, that knows how to harness her inimitable presence and understated inventiveness. With Jadaone at the helm, Sunshine could finally be that material — one that could grow her international fan base and further her ascent as the next big thing.
Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Jadaone about her notion of a strong lead performance. She mused, it’s “a performance that knows that the film is bigger than her. That it is not about her, her acting, her performance. She is part of something bigger than herself.”
It’s a response that immediately made my mind drift to the humility of Racal’s reaction upon learning that she would not make it to the Toronto premiere.
“Heartbreaking. But it’s not about me, really,” she was quoted as saying in a report by ABS-CBN News. – Rappler.com
