How was your learning experience in IAFT Cebu?

One of the most important parts of IAFT life was to hang around very passionate people who also had this same dream and ideas about creating films and theater.

Living on the campus, sleeping, eating, hanging out, chilling by the pool, constantly with each other in a constant dialogue about what we could create in school, it was like a bank filled with creativity. Most of our ideas were really shit and we made so much crap in IAFT. Probably one out of 100 ideas turned out to be something good. But we did it, we took risks, tried silly characters, played around, tested each other’s limits, and that’s the learning process, that’s how we developed our skills and which the school allowed us to.

Another great thing with the school was our teacher Alex Murphy. He is great in many ways but maybe mostly, because he knows good writing. When we did our performance nights, we were handed good writing even tho we didn’t know it ourselves back then. We did not know how to separate good writing from bad, so we were lucky to have Alex there doing that for us. This is essential for an actor starting out, to get our hands on good play material. Alex taught me to honor the writer, and I had so much use for that in my career.

What were the best memories you have of IAFT?

My best memories are the performance nights, all of them. Those nights taught us, the hard way, how to interact with a real audience. They say that the audience will teach you everything you need to know. And I began to understand that there. Sometimes it felt like riding on a wave, when you can feel in your whole body that the audience is with you, and they will react to your every move or spoken word, then you know they are constantly listening to a story being told and not an actor performing, that feeling is addictive because it is so great. And there were also nights where we could feel that the audience really wasn’t in the scene, just watching actors performing and a not real life character. Probably because we didn’t move them enough that night, so that was bad acting and just as an important learning experience as when our performances turned out good. Learning the hard way!!

Any current projects?

I just finished shooting a short film, directed by a Swedish, Colombian director named Hernan Quintero, staring me in the lead role, produced by the company Casa Luego in Sweden. Earlier this year I also did a supporting in a role in the feature film named Finding Alice. I did a lead role in a project called Pleasure where I played a transsexual prostitute, for the movie Pleasure,  it was a short film that screened at Cannes a couple of weeks ago.

But the most important for this year will be the feature film TILT that I shot in Manila last year. Starring me and Mercedes Cabral in the leading roles. I went a couple of times to another city in Sweden this year called Gothenburgh to record some additional post sound for the film together with director Samir Arabzadeh. The film is finally done this week after a year of work with editing, color grading and so forth. Our producer Bianca Balbuena made sure to send our film to Venice Film Fest. They will let us know if we get accepted early next month. If we do get accepted, that is a huge success.