A Pinoy filmmaker was abandoned by his mother as a toddler, but grew up healthy and whole. He made a short film to honor the mother and to express his belated approval of what she did. The filmmaker is one of the eight cinema artists bestowed recently by the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (NCCA) with its Ani ng Dangal Award.
That filmmaker is Sonny Calvento, thirtysomething, and that short film is the award-winning Primetime Mother, released in 2023, some six years after his very popular father passed, TV crime anthology host Tony Calvento.
The younger Calvento couldn’t get himself to talk about his parents’ bitter separation while his father was alive. Like his dad, the son was closely identified with ABS-CBN.
The son actually honored his bedridden father in his first feature film in 2017, Nabubulok, a crime story which won several awards in international film festivals.
Primetime Mother is about a 45-year-old mom who bravely joined a TV contest to raise funds for the medical needs of her only daughter. As TV competitions go, she had to endure making a fool of herself in the games, Q&A segments and silly performances.
In a press statement shared with Rank Magazine in August 2023, the younger Calvento lengthily wrote:
“My mother’s persona is different from patriarchal standards and from what we see on Philippine television. When I was barely two years old, she left our family because she knew staying in our household would destroy her sanity.
“Growing up, I hated my mother. Being raised into a Catholic school and a patriarchal community, I could not grasp into the idea of being left by my own mother at an early age.
“It was only about four years ago, after meeting her in the flesh, when I realized that leaving me was the best decision that my mother had to make to keep her sanity. She knew that her constant fights with my father came to a point when she was on the verge of a breakdown, hindering her from functioning as a mother. She is a woman with so much love who suffered torture and eventually became a broken person and abandoned her kids.”
Primetime Mother competed — and won — in international film festivals before it was shown as an entry in the short film division of the 2024 Cinemalaya. Calvento won the Asian Academy Creative Awards in Singapore and Best Short Form Content in the Philippines by Singapore’s Asian Academy Creative Awards.
The Ani ng Dangal mainly honors artists who have won awards abroad. Aside from Cinema, the other categories are Architecture and Allied Arts, Dance, Music and Visual Arts. A total of 39 awardees were honored at the Metropolitan Theater in Manila recently to close NCCA’s celebrations for the National Arts Month (February).
Another indie filmmaker also won for something that has to with his mother. It’s Rian Simon Cabatingan Magtaan who clinched the Golden Kinabalu Award for Best Documentary for his “The Night is Drunk When We Suffer” at the 14th Kota Kinabalu Award International Film Festival 2023.
The story is, one night, a mother of five gets drunk. She then spends the rest of the evening expressing her frustrations, inhibitions and aspirations while her poet son tells all the miseries and shared trauma that bonded them together.
The filmmaker-poet son confided about his docu: “It is an experimental docu essay that explores my relationship with my mother. Fragments of phone footage and film photographs intertwine with poetry, politics and personal desire in an attempt to rediscover or drown myself in the process.
“I am a product of a never-ending cycle of poverty and oppression, and I am trying to rebuild myself from the fragments found in this film.
“My mama taught me a lot, especially about gambling in life, literally and figuratively. This is one of my gambles.
“I hope this film will serve as a wake-up call to my dad and all other oppressive individuals in this world. This is my attempt to talk about the culture of patriarchy, abuse and violence, particularly in creating a family.
“Suffering is optional, but I think we cannot break the barrier unless we speak.”
An actress daughter of the late actor Mark Gil is an awardee, too, for portraying a mother who lost her daughter and her husband due to a heartless accident.
She is Maxine Eigenmann whose character tracks down the culprit even as she has to work as a cargo truck driver in a southern province to locate the criminal. She occasionally moonlights as a sex worker when she is low on funds.
She does find the man who ran over her husband and daughter and does the same to him. The truck-driving woman ends up adopting a young girl whom some goons had been lusting for.
Eigenmann copped Best Actress for her performance in Kargo at the ASEAN International Film Festival and Awards.
A long reliable dancer-actress in indie films, the little known Sasa Cabalquinto from Cordillera (though she finished AB in Theater Arts at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines in Quezon City) was also honored with the Ani ng Dangal award for her Best Performance Award in the short film Vox Humana directed by Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan.
The jury praised Cabalquinto’s performance, stating “Sasa Cabalquinto makes the director’s fantastic character real and believable in Vox Humana through gestures and sounds in a story where the variations of language serve as the tool to connect with the mystery.”
Eigenmann and Cabalquinto are the only women among the 2025 Ani ng Dangal awardees. Other 2025 Ani ng Dangal awardees are Cris Bringas, Carl Joseph Lara, Sheron Dayoc and Carlo Obispo.
This 2025 is the 17th year that the NCCA awarded Filipino artists, groups and talents that represented our country and earned recognition in the global stage and competitions.
Commission chair Victorino Mapa Manalo, NCCA executive director Eric Zerrudo and Subcommission on the Arts (SCA) Commissioner Arvin Villalon personally handed the sarimanok trophy to the awardees. Members of the NCCA Board of Commissioners, SCA committee heads and members and NCCA secretariat graced the prestigious event.
Bringas is the writer and producer of All These Wasted Space, which won the Golden Reel Award–Best Narrative Short at the 34th Singapore International Film Festival.
Lara directed the Berlin Newgen Best Short Film winner Rumbles of the Earth. Dayoc was honored for his Gospel of the Beast, which won the Best Feature Narrative at the 17th Bali International Film Festival/BALINALE 2024.
Gospel of the Beast was shot entirely in Western Visayas (Iloilo and Antique) and was an attraction in the Czech Republic for the world’s oldest film festival the Zlin Film Festival now on its 64th year.
It was shown in the section International Film Festival for Children and Youth. which showcased around 300 films from over 50 countries worldwide, drawing an attendance of over 100,000 children and adults since 2010.
Obispo was Best Director for A Baseball Player at the ASEAN International Film Festival and Awards.