Regional Cinema in the Philippines: The Archipelagic Imagination

The introduction of low-cost digital technology in filmmaking gave rise to new voices, styles, and narratives in cinema. The book examines the unprecedented emergence of regional filmmaking scattered across the Philippine archipelago outside Metro Manila. It offers a much-needed critical lens in studying these emergent films and practices in Filipino cinema in the twenty-first century. It demonstrates how regional cinema offers a new way of imagining the nation and the national cinema as an archipelago, that is, as diverse yet connected through the currents of histories and cultures. In the book, a reconceptualized framework for national cinema is offered, one that anchors on multiplicities, heterogeneity, and diversity. The new imaginary of archipelago in understanding cinema and the nation opens possibilities for a change towards a decolonizing understanding of cinema and an egalitarian and inclusive social relation in the national spaces.