PODCAST | Samantha Sartori interviews Irene Villamor, director of the film Sid and Aya (Not a Love Story).

To listen to the interview, click on the ► icon on the right, just above the picture

At the New York Asian Film Festival 2018, we meet Irene Villamor and talk about her new movie Sid and Aya (Not a Love Story). Every summer, the festival brings movies to New York from all of Asia: China, Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, with free talks with directors and actors. Irene Villamor is a prolific director in the Philippines. She wrote and directed this modern fairy tale inspired by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan theory: “A Black Swan is an event that is impossible to predict, but has major consequences for us all.” Irene’s stories are based on real people that surround her and she told us how she develops and writes her movies, and how she works on set collaborating with actors, assistant directors, and the D.O.P. to give the final shape of the movie.

Sid and Aya (Not a Love Story): After decades of films that followed formula, a handful of (mostly) female filmmakers are reinventing the staple genre of cinema from the Philippines cinema: the romance. Irene Villamor is at the vanguard, with vibrant dialogue, honest situations…and sex. Here, Dingdong Dantes plays a cutthroat stockbroker who can’t sleep at night. He befriends Anne Curtis’ sassy cafe waitress and offers to pay her $20 an hour to talk him through his insomnia. But she becomes the one in control in this anti-romance that has as much to say about class war as the battle of the sexes. New York Premiere.

Discover more about the film here.