‘Perhaps Filipino cinema also deserves better audiences,’ says filmmaker Rodina Singh 

“Point blank: hindi natin kayang tapatan ang Hollywood. At least not under the circumstances we are working with,” Singh wrote.

She pointed out that many Filipino films operate on budgets of only a few million pesos, while Hollywood spectacles like Titanic and Spider-Man can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and are supported by massive production, VFX, distribution and marketing machinery.

“Hindi talent versus talent ang comparison na iyan. Resources versus resources, infrastructure versus infrastructure, market versus market,” she said.

Singh, however, turned the conversation toward something she believes is often left out of criticism of Philippine cinema: the audience.

“Because film is a language,” she wrote, arguing that cinema has its own grammar, vocabulary, rhythm, metaphors, genres and cultural contexts that audiences also have to learn to receive.

For Singh, saying “I didn’t like the film” is valid. Declaring that Filipino films are bad is a much bigger claim that requires an argument beyond personal taste.

“‘I was bored’ is an experience. It is not yet an analysis,” she said.

She cited the Philippine Statistics Authority’s 2024 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey, which reported basic literacy among 93.1% of Filipinos aged 10 to 64, but functional literacy at 70.8%.

Singh then raised the question of film literacy. Movies require viewers to process images, dialogue, sound, silence, editing, performance, symbolism, subtext and cultural references—sometimes simultaneously.

“Watching a movie is not automatically the same as knowing how to read cinema,” she wrote.

Singh also argued that audiences enter theaters carrying their education, class positions, politics, prejudices, media literacy and cultural conditioning. In a country grappling with disinformation and historical revisionism, she questioned whether habits surrounding the consumption of information could really disappear once people start watching movies.

She also confronted the familiar criticism that Filipino cinema keeps recycling stories about infidelity, poverty and dysfunctional families.

Her answer was simple: audiences help create formulas.

“What audiences repeatedly pay for, industries repeatedly produce,” Singh said.

If viewers complain about formulaic movies but reject experimentation as “weird,” “boring” or “hindi ko gets,” she argued, the commercial industry inevitably learns to finance what audiences have already proven they will watch.

Singh further questioned whether some of the loudest people declaring Filipino films inferior are even regular audiences of Philippine cinema anymore.

“They are its non-audiences,” she wrote.

Access to Hollywood, Korean cinema, anime, European films and prestige television, she argued, does not automatically make someone a sophisticated critic.

“Exposure is not comprehension, consumption is not criticism, and familiarity with expensive cinema is not cinematic literacy.”

Singh noted the irony that Filipino viewers can learn to understand American superheroes, Korean class struggles, Japanese monsters, British royalty and Greek mythology, yet sometimes refuse to extend the same curiosity toward stories from their own country.

That attitude, she argued, also affects the industry’s ability to grow. Investors will not increase budgets if Filipino films cannot make money. Producers will hesitate to experiment if audiences reward familiarity. And filmmakers cannot build increasingly ambitious productions if smaller films struggle to attract paying viewers.

Singh stressed that none of this means Filipino movies should be supported simply because they are Filipino.

“A bad movie can absolutely be a bad movie,” she wrote, adding that filmmakers must be criticized and standards must be raised.

But criticism, she argued, requires something beyond individual appetite.

“Don’t confuse ‘this film wasn’t speaking to me’ with ‘this film has nothing to say.’”

For Singh, Philippine cinema still needs better scripts, production, funding, institutions, distribution, exhibition and criticism.

But it may also need something rarely included in conversations about fixing the industry: better audiences.

Not audiences who automatically praise Filipino movies, she clarified, but viewers capable of separating preference from assessment, understanding material limitations and recognizing cinematic languages different from their own.

“Hindi pwedeng filmmakers lang ang produkto ng lipunan. Audience din,” Singh wrote.

And if cinema is a mirror, Singh ended with an uncomfortable proposition: when audiences repeatedly dislike what they see, perhaps the mirror is badly made.

“Or baka gumagana lang talaga siya.”

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