All synopses are courtesy of press materials, unless otherwise noted.
FILMS ABOUT WOMEN AND GENDER NON-CONFORMING PERSONS OPENING AND COMING TO STREAMING/VOD
Leonor Will Never Die — Written and Directed by Martika Ramirez Escobar
Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,” we’re told. But how does this adage apply to the final quarter of our lives, when we are no longer working? Do we surrender what we love as easily as we clock out of a workday at 5 PM? Can a person truly retire from their job, when that job is also their lifeblood? This is the dilemma that the titular character faces in Martika Ramirez Escobar’s “Leonor Will Never Die.”
Written and directed by Escobar, the surrealist and avant-garde comedy follows Leonor Reyes (Sheila Francisco), a once-eminent figure in the Filipino action film industry who is, to her dismay, retired. Now in her sunset years, Leonor is not only grieving the loss of her livelihood but also her late son, Ronwaldo (Anthony Falcon), whose frequent sojourns in the mortal realm help blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, the living and the dead in the film. Ronwaldo is also the namesake and inspiration for the protagonist in Leonor’s abandoned action screenplay, “The Return of the Kwago.”
She picks up where she left off with “Kwago,” excavating the incomplete script from its coffin, a dusty box of forgotten mementos. After a satisfying writing session, however, Leonor is suddenly struck on her head by a falling TV set and is rendered comatose. Leonor is then transported inside her own screenplay. Inside “Kwago,” she is at once a player, spectator, and scribe in her own movie. Leonor experiences every writer’s dream: touching, feeling, and living in a universe of her own invention. (Vicki Lee)
Read our interview with Martika Ramirez Escobar.
“Leonor Will Never Die” is now in theaters.