Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis at the New York Film Festival

If you wanted to get scared this Halloween, you might pop in a scary video- blood, guts, and mask-wearing psychos.  But imagine a world where your best efforts didn’t matter.  Your college degree will land you nothing but a dead-end job, you sell sex for a meager living, and the law is not on your side.  Welcome to Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis, a film about a family running a porno theater in Angeles City.  If you can manage to pry your hands from your eyes (the film is, to put it mildly, graphic) you might gain some insight into what life is like for a certain group of people in the Philippines.

For many Pil-Ams, especially those of us who grew up outside of the Philippines or haven’t been there in awhile, life in the Philippines is sometimes idealized.  Many of us know that a majority of  Pilipinos are poor, but don’t really know what struggling for a living entails. Serbis (based on real interviews and research) portrays a world that is anything but idyllic.  Nayda, the eldest daughter, has a nursing degree but is instead overseeing the daily operations of the crumbling theater.  While the film doesn’t explicitly explain why she’s not using her degree, it implies that a feeling of obligation to help the family business, combined with lack of job opportunities in the Philippines are her main reasons.  Alan, the painter, expends his artistic energy painting raunchy billboards for the theater and having unprotected sex with his girlfriend.  And all around the family inside the theater, male prostitutes sell “service” (serbis). Although not everyone in the Philippines has to endure the gritty lifestyle of the fictional Pineda family, watching the film really opens one’s eyes to what some people actually have to do just to survive.

Serbis competed at the Cannes Film Festival last spring, the first Pilipino film to compete at the Festival since 1984.  In addition to Cannes, the film has already clocked a few miles, having been screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, and the Pusan International Film Festival.  According to Variety.com, Regent Releasing now has the North American rights to the film and will release it in select cities this winter.  So if you’re looking for a jolt stronger than anything Jason or Freddy Kreuger can dish out, watch Serbis.  You’ll get an eyeful, but you won’t regret it.