A film by Chinee Suministrado, with script editing and co-directed by Zam

This is a submission by Chinee Suministrado. Edits were made by Type B.

If love is a culmination of grief, then the whole city of Manila is a cemetery.

“Puntod ng Maynila” is a 10-minute short film by lesbian artist Chinee Suministrado, a visual exploration of external grief that took form through the creator’s love of poetry. “In trekking through multiple heartbreaks, we often find ourselves basking in the amalgamation of our grief—revisiting past remembrances, persons, and short-lived beams of memory,” she recalls,

The short film navigates urban Manila just as that—a cemetery. Under its chiaroscuro of streets, the main character, Kat, traverses the metropolitan cityscape on her way to a date, encroached by tombs of what once was. To make sense of her grief, she visits corners of the postmetropolis as tombs of the past and finds herself unearthing former connections and escapades within the shadows of neon-lit architecture; places for evanescent memories. As these reminders of her strife unfold, she eventually finds herself surpassing grief.

In the final frame, Kat reaches the last Puntod and discovers her tombs weren’t those of people in her past, but tombs of her forgotten dreams, hopes, desires, and personas. A revelation that sometimes, the most painful grief we have to confront is not that we have loved and lost others, but that we have occasionally let go of ourselves, too.

“Highly inspired by the writing styles of indie poets maryangsinukuan and Joi Barrios, I had a desire to translate my writing into visual art—film!,” the artist shares. As a growing artist with limited resources, Chinee and her friend Zam, the script editor and co-director of the film, wrote and edited for about a week. “We filmed Puntod ng Maynila in one whole night after school hours with his camera. We were brazenly experimental with filming it—hence, the several dutch angles and wobbly cityscape clips (mimicking Wong Kar-Wai filming in urbanic landscapes).

I, eventually, came to love the piece with all my heart after I finished its final output—it indeed was a culmination of all my love, all my grief, and all my hope coming back to me despite it all. Maybe, just maybe, it could also be a love letter to all lesbians out there (healing or not), that our love always finds its way back to us in the end; it is never wasted.” 🌈

About the Author

Chinee is an independent visual artist and aspiring filmmaker based in Quezon City. Her work points to introspection, revealing parts of our humanity that often require deeper connection and knowing.

“I create art for art’s sake, and I do so daringly, in a way that resists, copes, beautifies all that is mundane, and revolutionizes. I find living in seeing that there is life in anything! And translating that into art makes it so that it becomes immortal. I believe that through that, we can finally find what is often unfound.”

Follow Chinee on Instagram at @futuritynichin.