Arquivo / 49ª mostra

A young Filipino man named Hanzel Harana is murdered in Jersey City, a few hours from New York, and a Filipino police officer named Juan Mijarez investigates the crime. As Mijarez interviews the victim’s mother, girlfriend and friends, flashbacks appear of the young man in an immigrant Filipino community that struggles with maintaining tradition in the face of easy capitalism. Mijarez comes to see that the whole community is responsible for this young man and others like him. This was Diaz’s first completed independent production, shot largely in the United States. It reflected his experience of living abroad, as millions of Filipinos do. The critic Alexis Tioseco, who saw the film at the Cinemanila International Film Festival (where it won two prizes), called it “arguably the first modern Filipino masterpiece.