Manila is Full of Men Named Boy
2018 · 21m · Philippines
Directed by Andrew Stephen Lee
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, surreal
Manila, July 7, 2009: against the backdrop of Michael Jackson's televised funeral and simultaneous terrorist attacks in the southern Philippines, an estranged son purchases a child who can drink and smoke in order to impress his chain-smoking, hard-drinking father — a pitch-black comedy about masculinity, colonial identity, and the absurd metrics by which men assign each other value.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A man buys a child who can drink to impress his father, set against MJ's funeral and a terrorist attack — Andrew Stephen Lee looked at the world and made it make sense by making it weirder.
Venice premiere shot in black-and-white when the color footage revealed nothing — Andrew Stephen Lee's pitch-black Filipino allegory of masculinity and colonial inheritance, with the MJ funeral as a real historical pressure plate. Exceptional.
Venice world premiere with a premise that should not work — a son buying a child who drinks and smokes to impress his father, against the MJ funeral broadcast — but the black-and-white reveal-during-edit anecdote suggests a filmmaker who found his tone the hard way. That's the kind of discovery I trust.
Reviews
The strange comedic tone of the short perfectly captured in its title…Manila is Full of Men Named Boy.
Festivals
- Venice Film Festival 2018
- SXSW 2019
- Palm Springs International Shortfest 2019, Best U.S. Short Film
- FilmFest Dresden 2019, Golden Horseman Award for Short Fiction Film