The best Joel Saracho’s drama movies

Abandoned by his American lover, a handsome teenager from the mountains journeys to Manila in an effort to support his family. With a popular call boy as his mentor, Paul enters the glittering world of male strippers, prostitution, drugs, sexual slavery, police corruption and murder. Teeming with sex and Asian beefcake, Macho Dancer is a searing indictment of the hypocrisy and police corruption rampant under both the Marcos and Aquino regimes.

A special forces team is sent to snuff out a drug den, but find themselves trapped inside it after being set-up and betrayed.

Andrés Bonifacio y de Castro is considered to be one of the most influential proponents in the struggle against Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines during the late nineteenth century. Today, he is still celebrated as the father of the Philippine Revolution.

Lola Igna is a foul-mouthed and stubborn woman who is eager to die but her neighbors are hung up on her winning "the oldest living grandmother in the world." Her long-lost great-great-grandson, Tim, is an aspiring vlogger who wants to latch on her now-famous grandma but ends up giving her a new reason to live.

In the traffic-laden streets of Metro Manila, two brothers use the chaos of the city roads as a smokescreen for their shady occupation tandem robbers on motorbike. But when a robbery goes sour, the brothers are forced to graduate from low level thieves to high profile hit men in an act that tests both their resolve and their relationship.

Dakip is a little boy who lives with his parents – Day and Ric – inside Camp Delgado, a makeshift prison inside a military camp for both rebels and criminals. Day does her best to shelter the child from the harsh realities of their life. She tells stories about an enchantress named Liway, with songs and imagination to help keep her boy from trauma. However, at the tail end of the Martial Law, her own dark past catches up on her and the lives of the detainees become increasingly difficult. She is confronted with the cruel possibility that the best interest of her child means never seeing her again. This is based on a true story.

The Philippines, 1972. Mysterious things are happening in a remote barrio. Wails are heard from the forest, cows are hacked to death, a man is found bleeding to death at the crossroad and houses are burned. Ferdinand E. Marcos announces Proclamation No. 1081 putting the entire country under Martial Law.

Taking leave from their jobs at a gold mine, three workers journey to their home village on foot through the spectacular yet unforgiving wilderness of the mythical island of Hugaw. As time passes and their conversations intensify, buried histories emerge and a sense of psychosis invades the scene. As ever, Lav Diaz’s exquisitely subdued black-and-white images and patient rhythm lend a Brechtian register to the drama; almost always filmed from the same fixed distance, each scene is an immaculate tableau vivant. Behind the film’s folkloric façade, Diaz once again taps into the collective memory of defiant struggles against the tyranny of both contemporary Filipino society and colonial brutality, centred on the timeless image of men walking – one of the key traits of Pan.

Intoy was left to take care of his parents when his sister Vicky leaves to work overseas. Eventually, like many women in the island, Vicky married a foreigner thinking it will solve all her family’s problems. Living in a remote area, Intoy can only get in touch with his sister by scrambling atop strange rock formations on the island.

It is the year 2034 AD and Southeast Asia has been in the dark for the last three years, literally, because the sun hasn’t shone as a result of massive volcanic eruptions at the Celebes Sea in 2031. Madmen control countries, communities, enclaves and bubble cities. Cataclysmic epidemics razed over the continent. Millions have died and millions have left.

A professional horror movie extra prepares for her first ever acting award nomination.

In the late 70s, a gang of militias under the control of the military, terrorizes a remote village in the Philippines. The poet/teacher/activist, Hugo Haniway, decides to find out the truth about the disappearance of his wife. A love story set in the darkest period of Philippine history, the Marcos Dictatorship. Based on real events and real characters.

Lisang’s soul is trapped in purgatory due to her bad behavior. Once again, her name is picked and reconsidered. Will she be able to make it this time?

Daisy Resurrection, an overseas Filipino worker, comes home from years of working broad, but her homecoming is unlike any other OFW story you’ve heard of.