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“I never really avoided the mainstream. It was the mainstream that had avoided me all these decades,” Raymond Red told me over voice mail, before adding that his first legitimate foray into mainstream filmmaking after 43 years — courtesy of the 2025 Metro Manila Film Festival entry Manila’s Finest — is quite “bittersweet.”
The movie follows the lives of 1970s Manila’s so-called finest police personnel, led by Homer Magtibay (Piolo Pascual), as they wander through the city’s slums and red-light district, wrestling with brutal murders, relentless turf wars, and growing social unrest, which, as they soon learn, all build toward something far more sinister and draconian. Red trades propulsive crime action for a bleak, pensive character study that movingly asks what it means to sustain ideals in an encroaching system that would rather have us become awfully pragmatic, and worse, complicit.
Pascual, who also serves as the film producer, joins familiar and new faces including Enrique Gil, Ashtine Olviga, Cedrick Juan, and Rica Peralejo (back after a long acting break, though she doesn’t have much to work with here).
Red was initially tapped as a cinematographer for Manila’s Finest by his niece, Babae at Baril director Rae Red, who was set to helm the movie but backed out of it a month after pre-production due to personal reasons.
“The production thought who better to pick up the pieces, so to speak, than me because I was already on board the project and had been through the pre-production as a cinematographer,” Red explained. “It was only at that point that I started thinking I could do this. I realized this was up my alley.”
So began Red’s return to directing feature films, after his unintended 10-year hiatus, which should delight the iconoclast filmmaker’s hardcore fans.
RED. The official poster for ‘Manila’s Finest.’ Photo courtesy of the filmmakersOver the years, as his two sons Mikhail and Nikolas found their audience in mainstream genre cinema, Raymond kept working on what he knows best: independent and alternative cinema, which he helped pioneer alongside the likes of Kidlat Tahimik, Lav Diaz, Roxlee, and Khavn. Red maintained his artistic distance from his sons, only working with them for the first time in the horror film Lilim, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam earlier in 2025.
But Red’s distance from mainstream moviemaking, like he said, was not of his own accord. Ever since the director picked up his dad’s Super 8 camera and made his first film in 1983, turned to commercial work in the 1990s through the 2000s, and won the Cannes Palme d’Or for his 13-minute short Anino, he was already thinking of making films for big studios and big producers like Lily Monteverde, but on his own terms.
“I guess through the decades, I earned this reputation of being a stubborn, experimental, alternative filmmaker, who would only do the films he wants and the way he wants [them],” he said.
Red persistently peddled his ideas to all the big studios — Star Cinema, Viva Films, and GMA Films, to name a few. He even had a 35-year-old screenplay for a Second World War film called Makapili, a Super 8mm study that was released in 1989, and which he kept pitching to local and foreign financiers, the last one being at 2018 Cannes, but with no success.
“So, if we consider the fact that I hadn’t done a full-length feature, it was mainly because there was no interest in the types of films I wanted to do,” Red continued.
When he was offered to direct Manila’s Finest, Red reckoned it was something he had long been waiting for. “It’s a script and story that was kind of close to me,” he said. “It’s a period film, it’s about history, and it has a sociopolitical context in it. Most of my films are like that.”
The MMFF movie is not just his first legitimate stab at mainstream cinema but also the first material — whose screenplay is credited to Michiko Yamamoto, Moira Lang, and Sherad Anthony Sanchez — that he didn’t originally come up with or write alongside his longtime friend and collaborator, Ian Victoriano.
“But it’s that realization that the script was really in line with my convictions and my dreams of exploring the issues I’ve been presenting even way back in my short films,” Red stressed. “And now I’m given an opportunity to explore such issues again on a much bigger scale, with the film backed by a studio in a mainstream setup, with a bigger budget, so I immediately accepted it.”
Red’s last feature film was 2015’s Mga Rebeldeng May Kaso, though his feature projects were often done too few and far between. The 2015 title premiered in-competition at the Cinema One Originals Film Festival. It’s a nostalgic paean to the local independent film scene in the wake of the EDSA People Power revolt that regrettably took a lot out of Red, who ended up spending over half a million pesos out of his own pocket for the film to reach fruition.
“I have to admit it was kind of painful because you poured a lot of passion into independent, alternative films to the point that I even invested a lot of my own money and not a single peso would come back, simply because you wanted to make a better film,” he said. “And I don’t even own the rights to the film, so it got me thinking about this insane thing I’ve been doing for, well, 33 years at that point in 2015.”
As he couldn’t keep financing his films on such a scale, Red soon focused on teaching students and lecturing in workshops. Yet, his filmmaking never halted in the interim. He kept working on short and experimental movies and began exploring moving image installations and participating in gallery exhibits. (Interestingly, the director was first drawn to painting, which he studied under a scholarship at the Philippine High School for the Arts and the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts.)
Much of the story in the film takes place during the First Quarter Storm of 1970, a series of widespread demonstrations sparked by Ferdinand Marcos’ reelection as president, until his declaration of Martial Law in the country in 1972. At the time, Red was in grade school in Ateneo and already felt the impact of the Marcosian rule. “I came from a big family of 10 kids,” he said. “And we all remember that vividly. And I’ve met a lot of people who have vivid memories of what happened then.”
That lived experience factored into the pre-production and actual production, which according to Red, “surprisingly went smoothly.”
“There were no major clashes on set, no major accidents or problems,” he recalled. “Our only major problem was the weather. There were a lot of rainy days on the shoot days that we had designated, but we managed that.”
Red worked closely with production designer Digo Ricio to render the milieu as lived-in and as textured as possible. As a self-proclaimed “car nut,” the director was very particular about the vehicles used in the movie. He insisted on acquiring in-running condition VW Sakbayans, which ubiquitously served as utility vehicles and the Philippine Constabulary cars in the ‘70s, alongside another vintage car brand, the Toyota Toyopet, which was equally popular as police taxis during the period.
Mounting the reality of the politically-charged movie, by the director’s own admission, was the hardest part. “Every shot had to be put together almost like a painting, almost like a puzzle, even before you ask the actors to go on set,” he said. “I really appreciated their patience in my meticulous way of lighting, finding the right positions where they have to be, so that the light falls on their faces the exact way we wanted it.”
“It’s a very visual film,” the director added, and rightly so: Whereas its trio of writers ultimately truncate the narrative’s emotional tension and range, defaulting to rather startling lurches toward the coda, Red’s visual craftsmanship ingeniously holds the film together. The sophistication with which he photographs his actors and composes his images is a cinematic embrace only a filmmaker with real grasp of form could pull off, though the resulting picture to some degree seems indebted to Insiang or Babae at Baril.
A scene between the Manila cops and the Metrocom personnel at a Binondo noodle joint is particularly remarkable, one of the many sights in which Ricio’s production work, aided by a jazz-heavy soundtrack, delightfully transports us to Old Manila, whose glowing allure is encumbered by casual displays of carnage and precarity.
Manila’s Finest is not exactly a late masterwork, but it’s the sort of project that nevertheless feels exciting to witness, especially from a longtime director, who struggles to fund his films but still bursts with desire to create.
ARTIST. Director Raymond Red. Photo courtesy of the filmmakersThat it has taken this long for Red to make his feature comeback somehow owes to his still opting to work slowly and patiently, even as our screen-addled world speeds up. “I’ve always believed in that. I think classic filmmaking or art-making is like that. It really takes time,” he said.
“I’ve done seven full-length feature films, but dozens of short films, experimental films, and even art installations. It took me years to brew them, to create them, to make them really form and let the pieces fall in place.”
There’s also a reason why Red’s films are hard to access or nowhere to be found online. True to his alternative sensibility, he’s doing it on purpose. “In a way I was kind of sacrificing my own films because my goal is to find an audience and show my films to a wider audience, and yet I’m doing this to make that statement for people to realize that artists who went into filmmaking, moving image, and storytelling, they go through so much pain in planning the stories that they make,” he said.
“They go through a lot of pre-production; the script writers write the screenplay in a certain way that they can imagine the pacing of a film. And then when you go through production and shooting it, you go through so much effort to be faithful to that script and make the story run the way it was intended. And then when you get to post-production, the editors [ensure that] the sound and music and visual effects and transitions and all that are made in a very specific way, run along with the way the film is intended to be seen and to be told. And so when a movie is two hours long, it’s intended to be seen that way.”
“So it’s that belief, it’s that respect with the moving image art because it’s temporal,” Red continued. “That was the main difference I discovered when I switched from painting to film; that the major element in cinema was not just motion — it was time. You catch your audience in a specific length of time.”
“Whereas a painting, it depends on the person looking at it. I mean, they could sit in a gallery and stare at it for hours if they want. Or they can just glance at it and walk by, you know. But in film, you capture them. The only disadvantage in film is they can walk out. And that’s their right. So I always say that, you can always walk out on my film, but you have to watch it from beginning to end.”
Yet the alternative auteur knows that soon enough he might have to make his films available for streaming. “Because that’s the way to go now,” he admitted. “And that’s why I say the streaming platforms are now mainstream. The word itself has become literal — mainstream, main source, the true definition of that term.”
“And now the main source is TikTok, YouTube, all these videos young people are watching online, and there are more people watching it in the millions. So, technically, that is the mainstream of the moving image. And eventually theatrical cinema, as we see it, is becoming the ancillary and niche means of seeing a film. But I hope it will not die.” – Rappler.com
