In 2013, our hope for Oscar gold rested in the paws of a little film called Bwakaw, the Cinemalaya entry directed by Jun Robles Lana, that tells the story of an old gay man and his dying dog.
Bwakaw had the makings of a strong Oscar contender. It premiered at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival to rave reviews and generated significant buzz when it was screened at the New York Film Festival. The New York Times praised the performance of lead actor Eddie Garcia, calling him a Filipino Clint Eastwood. In a glowing review, Variety magazine called the film “a quiet charmer,” and industry website AwardsCircuit.com bet that the film was a top contender for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
But when the shortlist for the Best Foreign Language Film category was announced, Bwakaw was nowhere to be found. This is despite the fact the film was backed by Fortissimo Films, an international sales company that represents acclaimed films such as Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love, and the multi-million peso advertising campaign, funded by a few good Filipino souls, that ran across Hollywood publications, and some strong reviews from the trades (“A captivating charmer from the Philippines,” said The Hollywood Reporter).
But the most important tool in a film’s Oscar campaign arsenal is publicity. The film has to be seen and considered by Oscar voters. Films with constant press coverage and screenings can gather enough momentum to be included as Oscar nominees. The nomination can’t rely on merit alone. It has to be out there, especially since some Oscar voters have admitted they don’t really watch all of the Oscar nominees.
The race for the shortlist
Our entries are selected by the Film Academy of the Philippines (FAP) among the releases of the eligibility year. Some of our entries in recent years include the 2024 documentary And So It Begins, which follows Rappler CEO Maria Ressa and then-presidential aspirant Leni Roberdo during the 2022 general elections; the animated drama Iti Mapukpukaw starring Golden Globe nominee Dolly De Leon and filmmaker Erik Matti’s grim thriller On the Job 2: The Missing 8. Since Bwakaw, the Philippines has consistently sent entries to the Foreign Language Film category — with the exception of the controversial failure of the FAP to submit in 2022 — and none of them even made it to the shortlist.
Lav Diaz’s Norte: The End of History actually had a good shot of getting a nomination. It premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival at the Un Certain Regard section where it was nominated for the Prix Un Certain Regard. It was picked up by The Cinema Guild, the distributor behind award-winning films by filmmakers RaMell Ross’ Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018).
By the end of 2013, Norte was in several Best Films of the Year lists, including publications Sight and Sound and Film Comment. It also holds a 93 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Norte later scored Best Foreign Film nominations at the Film Independent Spirit Awards, where it competed against Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (United Kingdom), Xavier Dolan’s Mommy (Canada), and eventual Oscar winner Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida (Poland).
Norte still didn’t make the Oscar shortlist. The film did hire a U.S.-based PR company to handle its Oscar campaigning, but it didn’t get enough financing to sustain the campaign. “Really bare bones,” said the film’s producer Moira Lang.
“[W]e didn’t know what we were doing. We went there with our borrowed barong tagalogs, smiling at the vast nothingness. There was no campaign. We didn’t get any support. No money, no help,” Diaz told Vice in 2023.
In 2008, the Philippine press was abuzz with talk about Ploning, the Judy Ann Santos drama that was our entry to the Oscar race. Ploning is still remembered as that small Filipino film that dared to shoot for an Oscar gold. The words “impossible,” “herculean,” and “daunting” were thrown around the film’s campaign. Santos herself flew out to Los Angeles to promote the film.
The road to the Oscars was a mad scramble for Ploning. After the Film Academy selected “Ploning” as the official Philippine entry, the team had to rush to meet the October Oscar submission deadline. They only had two weeks to have the film subtitled and get the print shipped to the U.S. since the FAP’s selection was announced in late September.
Another obstacle before starting the campaign was looking for a publicist to help them lay the groundwork. Their team haggled with Murray Weismann and Associates, a PR firm, to get their services, having handled Oscar winners like the 2005 crime-drama film Crash, the 2002 Broadway film adaptation of Chicago, and the 1998 period drama Shakespeare in Love.
Team Ploning raised funds through the help of celebrities, friends, auctions, dinners, and government assistance (P2.5 million), but it still wasn’t a match the mammoth $100 to $500-million campaigns that other films had. Full-page ads in industry publications were also supposed to be part of the campaign, but the fees already amounted to the entire production budget of Ploning (P20 million or around $344,000)
The team had to rely on screenings to generate awareness among potential Oscar voters. According to the rules of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), you are not supposed to know or contact Academy voters for the International Feature film category.
“They will make a few screenings of your film, they will give you the dates, but you are not allowed to come,” said Ploning director Dante Nico Garcia in a 2013 interview in The Philippine Star. “And you’re not allowed to give anything to anyone. They told us that the idea is you’re doing a blind campaign. Hindi nila sinasabi talaga, but the idea is just keep on going.”
Garcia had to set up screenings of their own, something they didn’t have the budget for. Screenings outside theatrical venues require you to cover the insurance of the audience. Food also had to be served after the screenings, which was then estimated to cost $15 per head. Fortunately, Santos had a fan who does Filipino food catering in LA, which only cost them $2 per head. It was then a succession of daily screenings, meeting Filipinos in Los Angeles, and tracing Filipino connections to big Hollywood studios and Academy-related groups.
A history of learnings
But History repeats itself. Despite lessons learned from Ploning, team Bwakaw hit similar roadblocks when it was chosen as the Philippines’ entry in 2013.
“Wala talaga kaming money for the campaign,” said Tonee Acejo, line producer of Bwakaw in a 2013 interview. “Ang naging problem kasi dun ang dami namin expenses sa Bwakaw hindi na kinaya yung Oscar campaign. Hindi naman namin alam na [mapipili kami for the] Oscars. Na-excite lang kami kasi nakapasok kami ng film festivals. Nakapasok sa Toronto? Go agad! Pero ang shino-shoulder nila ng expenses is yung filmmaker lang,” Acejo said. Through its sales agent Fortissimo Films, Bwakaw was not even able to find a U.S. distributor.
It seems all previous attempts at an Oscar campaign have fallen through because of funding. After all, while publicists and sales agents help in generating hype for a film, its distributors and studios’ multi-million-dollar companies such as Warner Bros., Disney, 20th Century Studios, and Sony Pictures actually lobby Oscar voters into considering an entry. These days, smaller boutique producers and distributors such as A24 (The Zone of Interest, Close), Neon (Parasite, Anatomy of a Fall), and Mubi (The Girl with the Needle) have managed to score Best International Feature Film nomination (and wins) with their innovative marketing strategies.
But here, industry insiders also look to the FAP, an organization composed of the cinema guilds in the country, in untangling the procedure of selecting the country’s Oscar entries in the first place.
“When you go to the U.S. [by October],” Garcia shares, “The oldies of Hollywood (the average age of Oscar voters are said to be 63), from Thanksgiving, they’re on vacation until Christmas. They only return in January. The only relevant festival you can be screened at before the Oscar shortlist is released is the Palm Springs International Film Festival. After which, you only have two weeks to campaign before they make the shortlist. So tigok talaga yung oras mo kung October lang.”
For their bid to the Oscars shortlist, the team of Iti Mapukpukaw organized fundraisers with a goal of P5.5 million or $100,000. Antoinette Jadaone, one of the film’s producers, was encouraged by an “Also in contention” mention from Variety in their Best International Feature Film predictions.
“It’s the farthest a PH film has reached in predictions, so taas-noo pa rin!” said Jadaone on Twitter, now known as X, with a screenshot of the Variety list.
“And for this [Variety piece] to come out, it’s a huge surprise for me,” director Carl Joseph Papa told Rappler in 2023. “Because admittedly, we don’t have that big of a machinery to do a campaign. But the things that we are doing to reach out to filmmakers, voters, critics, film bloggers, and aficionados, they are reacting to the film positively. It feels good and it helps with the campaign that we are doing.”
From this, the team attempted to steer the campaign through a grassroots approach. They sent screeners to high-profile film reviewers on X and asked them to tweet their thoughts about the movie. Still, the film failed to make the shortlist.
“Campaigning a non-English indie w/out an int’l festival premiere, a U.S. release, or a distributor all in less than 2 months is like pushing a boulder up a mountain,” said Dennis Buckly, one of the Iti Mapukpukaw campaign strategists, in a tweet. “We may not have reached the top, but meeting people along the way who helped us champion this film was our win.”
It’s important to keep in mind that a nomination or a win isn’t just glitzy showbiz prestige. It opens up a whole new perspective for the film industry. The Brazilian film industry, for example, was completely enlivened by the nominations of its 2004 entry, City of God — a film that went on to be a big international hit, contributing millions to the Brazilian economy. The win of Parasite further opened up Korean movies and media to the rest of Hollywood.
Does the nomination matter?
But should we care about getting to the Oscars at all? Is this chase for Oscar gold another form of our obsession with Western validation? It should be noted that there are Filipino members of the Academy, such as Lav Diaz and Brillante Mendoza. Seven more were named in 2019, which included documentary filmmakers Baby Ruth Villarama and Ditsi Carolino. The inclusion means representation for Philippine cinema, especially now in the clamor for more authentic faces in the films that we watch.
The category has been controversial ever since, and many have called for changes — not only in terms of the category name but also in the rules as well, where Hollywood’s idea of “foreignness” is still rooted in a very dated worldview, the resistance to subtitled films being one of the main reasons, as hinted at by Oscar winner Bong Joon-Ho during his acceptance speech in 2020: “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” But if we really want to continue chasing the elusive Oscar nomination, it needs to be known that the Philippines’ main struggle is money. Filmmakers look to the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP) to help them with this headache, but a full-scale Oscar campaign shouldn’t be the sole burden of a government arm that is tasked with fixing problems in the local film industry first.
Elsewhere, there have been many wins for Filipino movies: Jaclyn Jose’s Best Actress award at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, Lav Diaz’s Golden Lion win at the 2016 Venice Film Festival (the same award Joker won in 2019), the Museum of Modern Art’s “A New Golden Age: Contemporary Philippine Cinema” film series in 2017, the Mike De Leon retrospective at the MoMA in 2022, Jadaone’s more recent win at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival for her film Sunshine. We have a cinematic heritage to be proud of already (though riddled with its own problems). If a Hollywood institution like the Academy Awards finally nominates a Filipino film in its, perhaps only relevant, category, it’s just a bonus.
An earlier version of this article appeared in The Philippine Star’s ‘Supreme’ section and CNN Philippines Life.
