What is Cinema?

In the midst of a wave of Filipino romantic comedies or horror movies that engulf our local theaters, Brillante Ma Mendoza consistently and diligently serves us a social-realist fare every now and then. " Alpha: The Right to Kill " (2018) is his latest film along such mold. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the San Sebastian film festival, it can perhaps be said that "Alpha" is what happens beyond " Ma' Rosa ", released two years earlier and penned by the same writer, Troy Espiritu. In that film, we have the title-character, a wife and mother living in a slum area in Mandaluyong, who uses her sari-sari store as a front to sell shabu to users. Unfortunately, the law enforcement officers close in on them, who, corrupt as they are, see in the situation an opportunity to squeeze money out of the woman and her family. The film doesn't pretend to offer a solution to the social malady. Rather, it adopts a fatalist outlook: that the broken system is...