Alternative cinema giant Raymond Red sheds light on the future of the moving image and why it took him 43 years to go mainstream with MMFF 2025 entry, ‘Manila’s Finest’
“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.
Over 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 ,” 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.”
Originally published on Rappler.
