Wanted: Border an Award - Winning Ilonggo Film

The Ilonggo comedy horror film Wanted: Border (spelled as is intentionally) starring the versatile star Ms. Rosanna Roces raked most of the top awards in the recently concluded 2009 Cinema One Originals Digital Film Festival. It has swept 7 awards namely: Best Picture (with a cash prize of P200,000); Best Director and Best Screenplay for Ray Gibraltar; Best Cinematography for Ogi Sugatan; Best Music for Erwin Romulo and Malek Lopez; Best Production Design for Alf Alacapa, Winston
Lazaro and Alan Hilado and Best Actress for Rosanna Roces.

The film is directed by Ray Gibraltar, which starred Rosanna Roces and other Ilonggo acting talents from Bacolod and Iloilo namely; Kristoffer Rhys Grabato, Sunshine Teodoro, Marisol Alquizar, and Raffy Tejada. Wanted Border is a “dark comedy” that follows lost people to look for refuge that eventually becomes a nightmare.

Religious fanatic Mama Saleng owns a boarding house and eatery. When she was a child living with her grandmother, they were both suspected of being aswangs. Her thirst for humanity was quenched when she met undercover agent Jessie Beltran during the Martial Law, whose task was to terminate activists in Panay. Mama Saleng grew to enjoy the face of death in her hands and totally embraced her childhood epithet of being an aswang. Now her boarders are disappearing one by one. Mama Saleng thinks that she can give redemption to others so she ends the misery of her problematic boarders by killing them and serve them cooked in her carenderia downstairs. No one will really know at first who was responsible for the disappearing of her boarders, and no one can even tell that she is a carnivorous. But with a plotline too irresistible, Wanted: Border makes viewers aware what its message is; “Our society has become cannibalistic. We are already eating each other alive.” Gibraltar said. He killed the character of Mama Saleng towards the end of the story to show that he wants to end the darkness side of our society, he wants a CHANGE.

Everything in the flick is suggestive, as you cannot see the actual killings, rape and other violence portrayed but you know they are happening in between.

This award-winning motion picture is done in Ilonggo and was filmed in the towns of Miagao and Guimbal in Southern Iloilo. This just lifted Iloilo again in the national arena of the film-making having the director, Ray Gibraltar, a native of Guimbal, Iloilo. The story is a mere product of Gibraltar’s wild imagination that he had written years ago and brought into life through the funding of the annual film fete of Cinema One, the Cinema One Originals. Gibraltar was also the one who created the Ilonggo film “Timawa Meets Delgado” in 2008 that earned an Urian nomination and included in the Indio Bravo Filmfest in New York.

http://www.gigsilonggo.com/wanted-border-an-award-winning-ilonggo-film.html