Roe Pajemna and Ray Gibraltar: Two impressive directors

Vivamax has just unwittingly sprung a surprise on us (or maybe just on me). Two of its almost new directors have impressive backgrounds as filmmakers. They are seasoned in their crafts and in the industry: Roe Pajemna and Ray Gibraltar.

Pajemna directs Balinsasayaw, which began streaming on 17 May. Gibraltar helms Serbidoras, which streams starting 28 May.

The former started directing music videos for Viva in 2015. Some of those music videos were for crossover classical singer Lara Maigue and teen stars Yassi Pressman and Andre Paras in a duet, which also featured child actor Alonso Muhlach. Pajemna also directed music videos for the Nadine Lustre-James Reid loveteam (which became real for many years and included a live-in for a few years).

Nicole Homillo, the alternate star of the musical version of the romantic film One More Chance now being staged by the Philippine Educational Theater Association, is also among those Viva Records artists for whom Pajemna helmed a music video. He was directing music videos as late as 2021, including one for reel- and real-life lovers Kim Molina and Jerald Napoles.

Music videos are classified as short films, though they typically don’t last longer than five minutes. After those music videos, Pajemna got assigned as creative researcher for a long string of Viva movies and TV series. By 2019, he was promoted as assistant director of full-length feature films and TV series. 

Vivamax streaming  was launched only in 2021 by the Del Rosario family that owns and operates the conglomerate that was initially called Viva Entertainment but eventually renamed Viva Communications, Inc. headed by patriarch Vic del Rosario Jr. whose entertainment entrepreneurship career began when he founded Vicor Records in 1996. He used to be a band player, along with cousin Orly Ilacad, Vicor co-founder who eventually put up his own OctoArts Records.

By 2023, Pajemna began to be assigned to direct films for Vivamax, though it’s only this 2024 the bulk of these movies began to be streamed. In late 2023, the company streamed his Punit na Langit about two female cousins in a distant village seduced and preyed on by the debauched workers of a perya (temporary carnival fairs put up during town fiestas) on the village’s outskirts. One of the two women is a mute who became one after her parents died in an accident. The other cousin is a seamstress.

Before Balinsasayaw, the company released Late Bloomer and Katas in the first quarter of 2024. Pajemna also writes the scripts for his feature films, which he enriches with local color. He grew up in a non-Muslim territory in Mindanao where he was known by his full legal name Rodante Y. Pajemna Jr., which he uses in his credits in some of his Viva projects.

Balinsasayaw actually refers to high-flying little birds in Palawan that build their nests in caves mainly with their saliva. Those nests are the main ingredients in a kind of soup known as “nido,” considered an exotic delicacy.

But the film’s narrative has nothing to do with those little birds, mightily reveals the youthful skin-head Pajemna at the media conference for the film held recently at the Viva company board room at the Ortigas center. (This was a rare media event for Vivamax, which usually holds its media huddles in the conglomerate-owned Viva Cafe in Cubao, Quezon City).

Pajemna said the film’s title is a metaphor for the two lead female characters in the story about two  women who conspire to eliminate a common male lover between them so they can be free to live their lives as covert lesbians. The stud, however, is also in cahoots with one of the two women to do away with the wealthy one so they can take-over her money and properties in town.

Vivamax mainstays Apple Dy and Aika Garcia portray those women. Their sizzling macho lover is played by Benz Sangalang who is now billed as “Vivamax King” — to the dismay of many of the movie studs of the company. Sangalang is a protegee of the famous (or infamous?) Jojo Veloso.

Pajemna seems to have an obsession for town fiestas. Balinsasayaw was shot entirely in a town in Nueva Ecija at the time of parades, processions and makeshift carnivals to celebrate the town fiesta. The criss-crossed plots to kill the macho lover and the wealthy woman will unfold amidst the riot of festivities.

“Sex is not all there is in my films. I tell highly engrossing stories, too,” asserts Pajemna at the boardroom media huddle.

Gibraltar is an award-winning filmmaker during the first decade of the 2000s. He was born in Iloilo in 1976 and he also grew up in that progressive Visayan province. 

Gibraltar is known as director-editor for the indie films Wanted: Border (2009), When Timawa Meets Delgado (2007) and Brod (2010). The last two-named films had male gay characters. Brod is about a macho gay who wants to join a frat in which his lover is one of the harsh masters who tortures him.

Gibraltar won Best Director and Best Screenplay for Wanted: Border at the 2009 Cinema One Originals Digital Film Festival. His film also won Best Picture.

Gibraltar’s films were surprisingly praised by the foremost lawyer-critic who goes by the pseudonym “Ogg Cruz.”

When Timawa Meets Delgado is partly a documentary where there is a segment in which a gay poem is read in Filipino, English, Hiligaynon and gayspeak that mixes English and Filipino in gay linggo. The poem was written by John Iremil Teodoro, a Palanca winner in English and Hiligaynon and was ranking professor at University of San Agustin in Iloilo city at the time the movie was made.

From being an indie filmmaker, Gibraltar joined GMA 7 where he directed several shows for years, including Wish Ko Lang.

Serbidoras is Gibraltar’s first-ever film for Vivamax. Playing waitresses friends in the film are Denise Esteban, Chloe Jenna and Aila Cruz. Always clad in their sexy and attention-grabbing uniforms, they draw unwavering interest from the male customers. The three friends also make a daring bet: which one of them will be the first to secure a relationship with a wealthy man?

Before long, they each find themselves involved with rich yet married men portrayed by Nathan Cajucom, Vino Gonzales) and Chad Alviar. 

Vivamax now has 11 million subscribers and earning incredibly well. Happily, despite that,  Viva Communications, Inc. will never give up making films for theater release where there is prestige and respect. Let’s hope Gibraltar will one day soon be asked to do a movie for theater release that can win awards later. Gibraltar seems to be a rock at 47 years old.