JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Last Sunday at Cinemalaya, our menu was one of unrelenting grimness. First there was Bwaya, in which parents search for the body of their child who had been attacked by a crocodile. Then there was Ronda, in which a policewoman drives through the mean streets of Manila as she looks for her runaway son. Finally there was Children’s Show, in which children beat each other to death.

This would’ve been reason enough to watch nothing but romantic comedies for the next three months, except that at its harshest and most unforgiving, Children’s Show lifted our spirits. In Roderick Cabrido’s film, life beats people to the ground, but they refuse to be broken. On the surface the film appears to follow the miserablist social realism template of “serious” Filipino indie cinema (i.e. poverty porn), but then it turns around and offers, if not hope exactly, then the possibility of it.

Read our review at InterAksyon.com.