It’s undeniable that Pinoys are hopeless romantics, which is why more and more romantic hugot films are invading our big screens. When you take a look at your movie list as a millennial, you will notice one thing in common among most or many of them– romance genre. It’s in a Pinoy’s nature to crave for “sparks,” “feels,” “hugot,” and “kilig” in films. So it’s no surprise if they can easily get hooked for either mainstream or indie film. Although indie films offer a breath of fresh air to new viewers who have been used to mainstream with a more realistic or even new storyline that will also get you thinking hard.

1. Sakaling Hindi Makarating

“Hindi umiikot ang mundo mo sa iisang tao. Hayaan mong maglakbay ang ‘yong puso”

There’s nothing quite like a breakup to make you feel alone in this world. Suddenly, you don’t have a time for a happy hour, no one to talk to all day, and the day can’t seem to pass without seeing a happy couple. In Sakaling Hindi Makarating, Cielo (Alessandra de Rossi) finds herself in a similar situation after her fiance ends their 11-year relationship. She starts to receive mysterious, hand-painted postcards from all over the country, which motivate her to get up and explore the Philippines.

Sakaling Hindi Makarating will take you to five of the most beautiful provinces in the Philippines. It offers an extraordinary visual experience with its excellent cinematography, complete with aerial shots of Zamboanga’s vinta regattas and Batanes’ seaside cliffs, to name a few.

The film first premiered in early 2016 as an entry to last year’s CineFilipino Film Festival. It won first runner-up for Best Picture and won seven awards in total, including Best Director (Ice Idanan), Best Cinematography (Ice Idanan), and Best Actor (Pepe Herrera).

2. Mr. and Mrs. Cruz

“Gaya rin ng mga bato rito, marupok din ang tao.”

It revolves around two strangers who decide to run away from reality for a while and forget their miseries while basking in paradisical Palawan. Rafael “Raffy” Cruz (JC Santos) and Angela “Gela” Cruz (Ryza Cenon) have the same last name but are unrelated, yet they spend their alone time together as they mend their broken hearts.

Both Gela and Raffy are heartbroken characters played by Ryza and JC, who meet each other in Palawan but are heartbroken for different reasons. When they go soul-searching in the island, they end up in the same tour group where they are also mistaken for a couple because of the similarity of their last names. While their circumstances may not be ordinary, their characters are three-dimensional and realistic enough for viewers to be able to relate. Their heartbreaks and hugot lines may also be something we have experienced in real life, and can teach us and make us reflect on how to handle them.

Popular and picturesque locations are now usually where romantic films are shot, and can be said to be another character in the film as well. There was Sagada in That Thing Called Tadhana, Barcelona in Barcelona, Sapporo, Japan in Kita Kita. One can say that Mr. & Mrs. Cruz followed that trend, with the film being set in Puerto Prinsesa and El Nido in Palawan. Of course, seeing Palawan’s majestic limestone cliffs and pristine waters is always a treat but Direk Sigrid was also able to integrate the location into the story. She makes use of elements (such as clownfish) and uses them as plot devices in the story.

3. Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa

“Nais kong malaman, Kung buong-buo pa rin ako sa iyong paglisan.”

Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa takes a risk in fusing music, dance, and poetry to present the complications around the lives of three characters in a complex love triangle—and succeeds delightfully. That is what literature, dance, and music, as separate art forms, are in fact supposed to do—explore an emotion, a character, a situation, a conflict. In effect, director Alvin Yapan’s Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa attests to the power of filmmaking as the ultimate art form itself.

The movie is harrowing at times, delightful for the most part. It deals with feminism which is represented by the dark and sad Karen (Jean Garcia), a literature and dance teacher who becomes an object of attraction and curiosity of her students. The film likewise touches on the subject of homosexuality, subtly executed by Dennis (Rocco Nacino) and Marlon (Paulo Avelino) who are both students of Karen.

Yapan’s film is laudable for its subtlety. Dialogues are lines lifted from poetry; movement and melody combined stand for a higher form of interaction and communication between characters. Desire is explored in all its pain and pleasure.

4. Kita kita

“Gusto kong sumigaw, umiyak, magmura, pumatay at magpakamatay.”

Spring Films brings yet another odd pairing to the big screen in Kita Kita. Dubbed as the “romcom ng mga pangit” (romantic comedy film of unattractive people), Kita Kita stars Alessandra de Rossi as Lea, the Filipina tour guide living in Sapporo, Japan who experiences temporarily blindness, and Empoy Marquez as Tonyo, the not-so-attractive fellow Filipino who helps Lea when she loses her sight.

It’s all very affecting, precisely because everything is defiantly good-hearted and idealist. Even in the film’s saddest moments, there is always that tinge of glee that feels earned despite the film’s reliance on narrative conveniences and other genre-specific machinations.

Sometimes it takes just one piece of novelty to make a rom-com work more wonders than the mostly hollow pleasures that are related to the genre. Kita Kita pursued its novelty of molding captivating characters out of unexpected leads while creating around them a droll and exotic world where both hard heartaches and fast hope collide. It is buoyant, without being too eager. When it is time for sobriety from all the color and cheerfulness, it is almost impossible not to swoon.

5. Ang Nawawala

“Counting twenty years, Twenty years from now.”

Ang Nawawala is a family drama set amidst the cushy confines of the upper crust: this is the world of the driver-driven, where everyone speaks in either straight English or straight Filipino, and uniformed housemaids prepare rooftop parties for their employers who collect cameras and vinyl records. This is the world that Gibson Bonifacio (Dominic Roco) comes home to. He doesn’t speak a word to his family: not to his distant and beautiful mother Esme (Dawn Zulueta), not to his nice bow-tie wearing dad (Buboy Garovillo), nor to his big sister Corey (Jenny Jamora) or his little sister Promise (Sabrina Man). He only really talks to his dead twin Jamie (Felix Roco), who died in a tragic accident when they were kids. Despite his self imposed silence, Gibson meets Enid (Annicka Dolonius) and finds himself falling in love with her. How can he not? She’s funny and cool, drinks beer and wears boots. (I’m sure half the boys at Cinemalaya are pining away for Annicka Dolonius, who is perfectly cast in this role. She’s delicate and wry, edgier than Zooey Deschanel and cute in a Japanese doll kind of way.) It’s Enid who draws Gibson out of his shy and non-speaking ways. Anyway, they don’t need words for listening to records and making out. When Gibson finally speaks, his first words are for Enid.

This film captures so clearly the subtle and fleeting moments in life that break our hearts and set us free. It’s heartfelt and stylish, and unabashedly the zeitgeist film for the members of this post-punk, post-slacker, post-everything generation who suffer-like all of us-the irony, the heartbreak, the long process of growing up and letting go.

6. Shift

“Sana sa pagmulat ko ay nariyan ka pa”

Estela (Yeng Constantino) is a call-center agent who really wants to have a new direction in her life. She is already tired working in a BPO industry until he befriended her gay co-worker Trevor (Felix Roco). The two instantly had a connection between them but Estela secretly falls in love with him. Will their friendship blossom into a relationship that could actually change their lives?

Cinelokal offers a second chance to catch a great indie film you’ve missed, or you want to re-watch every week for a very low price. For this week, they are offering Siege Ledesma’s Shift starring Yeng Constantino and Felix Rocco. This film reminds me a little about Sleepless directed by Prime Cruz. It is another story that revolves around call center agents but this time it has a different vibe but has the same satisfying result as a whole.

Shift is a well-crafted film that really easy to admire and fall into it. Yeng and Felix made their presence felt, and both preformed solidly throughout.

7. Ang Kwento Nating Dalawa

“Ang sabi mo walang hanggan, pero ‘eto tayo sa dulo.”

If it were not for these words from the film’s original sound track, Walang Hanggan by Quest, it would have been easier to miss the purpose of Ang Kwento Nating Dalawa‘s restless settings. Throughout the film we see the characters in places of motion: sitting in a taxi or on the steps of a bridge, waiting on train platforms, walking between stations. Always in transit, Ang Kwento Nating Dalawa never lets us forget that the characters are in love, but that this love is transient. As much as they would want things to be different, the road will always come to an end, the train will always come to a stop.

The camera in this film has a similar obsession with buildings under construction: hinting at things not quite formed yet, things with perhaps no certainty of completion or fulfillment; without proper labels, like the love between Sam (Nicco Manalo) and Isa (Emmanuelle Vera).

In our mainstream movies, there is always an abundance of words, of blame and raging anger; the conflict is always on a crescendo. In Ang Kwento Nating Dalawa, our characters cry, but there is no breaking down, no scandalous lover’s quarrel in public. They keep their affairs private; they remain tentative, even reluctant. Life goes on after the tears have been shed.

8. Sleepless

“Minsan nga naiisip kong tumalon dito eh. Pero hindi ako mahuhulog kasi lilipad ako”

“Sleepless” begins with the intro to B.P. Valenzuela’s Steady After its build-up draws to a close, we hear almost nothing as Gem (Glaiza de Castro) gets ready to go to work after a bout of insomnia. It is the play of silence and dialogue that sets Prime Cruz’s debut film effort apart from others.

Given its milieu (the urban setting where the main jobs left are BPO ones) and the film’s other stars (one of the Roco twins, Dominic, who plays Barry), comparisons can be easily made to a film from two years ago, “Shift” (2013). But its producer, who heads the QCinema Film Festival monitoring committee, but it was a far different film.

Much of the film focuses on dialogue that highlights the subtle, with its wit lying in the way it successfully rounds out the picture it paints of Gem and Barry. One memorable scene in a convenience store is a good example of this, where a conversation reveals—among other things—what they value in life. As the story unfolds, the careful viewer is rewarded for their intuition, helped along by a storytelling ethos that aims to show as much as to tell.

There is a dialed-down emotional sense that avoids the melodramatic clichés that pervade films here that tell the same story and place emphasis on the quotidian as revelatory. Even if one knew where the story could go, there was still a compulsion to see where it would go. Like all good dramas, its feeling of relief was real, especially when one sees the story to its end.

9. 100 Tula Para kay Stella

“Hindi kailangang tumigil ang mundo mo, nang dahil sa hindi naging kayo.”

This movie was a real emotional rollercoaster of the lives of Fidel Lansangan (JC Santos) and Stella Puno (Bela Padilla). It started out as a cute love story, barely scratching the lives of each character in the story. Then as the story progressed you could see more of the characters. The movie was so realistic that you can really relate to their stories. The themes portrayed in the movie mirrors the lives of so many people.

It is definitely worth the watch because the storyline is simple that I could basically say the plot in a single sentence but the director was able to make the movie so realistic and believable that I felt that I was in the movie as a spectator. The movie is anything but light. Both JC Santos and Bela Padilla acted so convincingly that whenever I see them on TV, I still think of their characters in the movie. Their struggles are common with people today. It was really relatable. There were moments in the film where I thought I would hate someone because of murder but it turned out I really did hate that someone because of something else he did.

It provides us quite a few lessons in life, the most notable of which are that most of the time, our dreams are different from what we eventually attain, sometimes the way we view people is different from the way they actually are and that people change so one day, when you look in the mirror, a different you may be looking straight back at you.”

10. I’m Drunk, I Love You

“Time Check, Umaasa ka pa rin”

I’m Drunk, I Love You has an easy plot line—the girl Carson (Maja Salvador) has been in love with her best friend Dio (Paulo Avelino) for seven years now but he doesn’t know. The beauty of it is how it is told: true and raw, with characters saying “Guys, na-jejebs ako” after a hanging question about a future girlfriend. Nope, there’s no uber-dramatic line like how they do it in teleseryes, as if people would actually say “If you want war, I’ll give you war” in real life.

Both graduating students from the University of the Philippines, they revel in late night inuman sessions and walwalan. Their bat cave of choice is Tomato Kick along Maginhawa Street (which has now closed down in real life) where we learn more of Carson’s dilemma—that Dio has tol-zoned her, “I love you, tol!” But it doesn’t matter where they are really, because Carson is your masokista college self who is drinking one bottle after another at Sarah’s in Krus na Ligas, Dapitan Square in Sampaloc, or Green Place along Taft Avenue. In any of these places, you’re with your own Jason Ty (Dominic Roco), your soundboard who’s always there to remind you of how stupidly in love you are with your own Dio.

But more than the love story that never was, the movie also touches on what a student’s graduation means to his/her family—for Dio, it’s the start of his parent’s imposition; for Carson, it’s a big celebration and huge sigh of relief for their whole barangay; how we find our life-long friends in the university; and the uncertainty that awaits after you put on your toga (or, in this movie, the UP sablay). This is your college story, after all, and I’m Drunk, I Love You is determined to bring you the whole package.

Still it doesn’t mean that indie films containing a hint of romance means that it’s purely a love story. It’s not all cheesy but with complexities as well. There are still a lot of issues, themes and life lessons to tackle along with it in the movie. The list above are recent romantic indie films which has a romantic ring. Happy Watching!