This year's Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival is suddenly, prematurely blitzed media when the event will be held in August yet -- all because Marian Rivera was cornered by reporters and some vloggers to talk about her entry in the festival at the sidelines of the launch of a beauty clinic of which she is the endorser.

Her entry is Balota, directed by the militant activist Kip Oebanda, who turned Marian’s fellow Kapuso actor Glaiza de Castro into a critically acclaimed star of a socio-political film, Liway, an entry in the 2018 Cinemalaya. 

In Balota, Rivera portrays a bold teacher who, during a rudely disrupted election canvas, grabs and hand-carries a heavy metal ballot box and runs into the forest to prevent the goons of one candidate from snatching it.

The movie is produced by GMA Pictures and GMA Entertainment Group in what seems to be the Kapuso network’s first Cinemalaya entry. Liway was produced by Alemberg Ang, who has been in charge of a long string of indie films. GMA Network has allowed many of its stars to banner Cinemalaya entries even they got to be known as “Sparkles.” 

Rivera is mightily proud of her performance in Balota for which she has completed filming. She revealed that she has a lot of exhausting, bruising physical scenes, and she wore no makeup at all.

At her mother studio, she is the star of the fantasy series My Guardian Alien along with Gabby Concepcion, child actor Rafael Landicho and Max Collins.

Practically no other entry in the forthcoming Cinemalaya has been played up in mass media, websites and vlogs.

Viva Films seems bent on reasserting its reputation of being the top movie company in the country that releases its output in theaters. Yes, that’s despite prevalent talks that Pinoy films have been flopping in the box office. 

The company — which gave birth to the wildly successful streaming platform Vivamax — is determined to release in theaters at least one movie a week.

We thought it was only the girls love (GL) movie Unang Tikim that it will release in July (the 17th, actually)

top-billing Vivamax stars Angeli Khang and Robb Guinto. 

We’ve just found out that Viva Films will show in movie houses on 3 July the horror-thriller Kuman Thung, written and directed by Xian Lim (yes, the actor and ex-boyfriend of actor Kim Chiu). The Vic del Rosario Jr.-headed company has slated a media conference this Wednesday afternoon (19 June), and we’re attending, so we’ll tell you next time what Lim and the Viva executives have to say about the public not being keen about films shown in theaters because many of those will also be streamed after a month or two. Of course, we’ll also quiz them on what in heaven’s name is Kuman Thung all about.

We expect Viva Films to spring on us their outputs they will deliver in theaters the movie week before 17 July and soon after the showing of Unang Tikim.

And, oh, today (19 June) Karma opens in the cineplexes. It stars Rhen Escaño, Sid Lucero, Paolo Paraiso and Krista Miller. It’s an action-drama fare in which Escaño is a bloody assassin. Karma is directed by Albert Langitan who has been assistant director in ABS-CBN and GMA 7. 

Meanwhile, the first film to be headlined by the GMA 7 Sparkles love team of Barbie Forteza and David Licauco is posturing to be shown most likely in July, too. The film producers have scheduled a media huddle.

The film is dubbed as That Kind of Love. But, oh, no it’s not produced by GMA Pictures but by an independent outfit. We know already that it was partly filmed in South Korea. We’ll tell you more about it and about how the on-screen lovers only behave towards each other off-screen.