Dante Nico Garcia looks back on Juday's 'Ploning'

In a time when theaters and streamers are battling for people's attention and wallets, Dante Nico Garcia wants to catch up with what he calls the current "transition stage" in Philippine cinema.

- By JANUAR JUNIOR AGUJA

"Cinema used to be the cheapest form of entertainment. Not anymore because it's streaming platforms," Garcia told The FREEMAN.

"Compared to paying a P300 ticket, with snacks and transportation, the one-month subscription is cheaper, and you can watch with the whole family at home."

Like most Filipino filmmakers of his generation, Garcia used to shoot his movies on 35mm before digital cinema took over - a shift that allowed more flexibility, such as taking multiple takes saved in a hard drive without the cost of burning through expensive film reels by frame.

"You were not counting by the number of shooting days, but by the length of the film negatives. You had to rehearse your scenes before rolling because we wanted to avoid a take two. It was such a different time," he recalled.

"I remember Brillante Mendoza told me that the younger filmmakers are lucky because they don't have to bring film reels in trolleys when they enter film festivals. They don't have to go through airport customs and ask staff not to scan the reels through X-ray because it would damage the negatives. Nowadays, you can just email an entire movie ahead of time," he added.

While the filmmaker from Palawan embraces this "inevitable" change in cinema, he still yearns for his work to be seen in cinemas.

"As a director, when I was making my first film, I was imagining people watching it on the big screen," he said. "That's why when you make a film, you need to make sure it's a film that someone is willing to spend so much money to see in cinemas over a platform at a cheaper price."

He suggested a middle ground, where studios can decide which films are more suitable for theaters or streaming.

"They used to say that video killed the radio star. Is streaming going to kill cinema, or is cinema just going to create a more specific market and declare whether a movie is for cinema release or for streaming? It's an interesting challenge."