CHANCE ENCOUNTERS

How a series of serendipities helped a women-led artistic team bring Gabriela Serrano’s sophomore short dream-time

- JASON TAN LIWAG

WHEN YOU ENTER THE UP FILM INSTITUTE MEDIA CENTER, you will be greeted by thick smoke, pink and green lights, and a giant sign that says “Elaine.” From the corner of the room, Gabby Padilla enters the frame wearing a sparkling silver dress, and a blowout that fits right in with the early 1990s. The room goes quiet as the track switches from NCT 127 to an unreleased OPM song and the band behind her begins to play. As Padilla begins to lip sync with a microphone on hand, the crowd around her leans in, heads bobbing to the beat. The scene feels like it’s ripped from a ’90s music video on MTV but it’s happening in real-time.

As this happens, Gabriela Serrano is fastened to the monitor. A clipboard of her shot list and storyboards in her arms, and a team of women forming a halo of support around her. They’re halfway through the first day of a five-day shoot for her sophomore short dream-time™. The last time Serrano was on set was in 2021 for her debut short Dikit, a silent film that reimagined Jose Nepomuceno Jr’s lost short by queering the myth of the manananggal using the split screen format. Shot guerilla-style at a resort in 2021, Dikit was a passion project crafted by her and her sister Mariana, star and co-writer of both Dikit and dream-time™. But as it accumulated prizes from Cinemalaya, Binisaya, and Singapore, Dikit became a passport to a cinematic landscape they thought inaccessible to them until now.