By Dom Galeon
Images by Lylet Soliven
I first heard about Petersen Vargas after watching 2 Cool 2 Be 4gotten, one of the movies featured at the 2016 run of the yearly Cinema One Originals independent film festival. The film, which he directed from a screenplay written by Jason Paul Laxamana, intrigued me because it was set in 1990s Pampanga and it’s about a group of three high school friends—not unlike the experiences of those of us who grew up in that decade. I watched it and I enjoyed it.
Later on, I learned that Petersen had another film, a short, which he did as a thesis project in college. Interestingly, it was also set in Pampanga, and its title—Lisyun qng Geografia—is even in Kapampangan. It puzzled me. Here’s a filmmaker whose existing works have all been shot in Pampanga. Apart from it being his hometown, what’s his deal with the place, I wondered.
Director Petersen Vargas
Thanks to screenwriter and playwright Doms Lim, I got a chance to finally meet Petersen Vargas and to understand him as a filmmaker, talking about how it all started for him over coffee and cigarettes at a cafe near Tomas Morato.
Petersen says that his venture into film was really more of an accident. “I was majoring in Politcal Science,” the 26-year-old filmmaker explains. “I come from Pampanga and a conservative, religious, traditional family of lawyers, so they wanted me to be a lawyer. I was smart, they said, so that paved the way for me to take PolSci at UP Diliman.”
But as paved as the path was for Petersen’s supposed future as a lawyer, it wasn’t an easy one. After his first year in PolSci, Petersen realized that it wasn’t going to work. “I was almost failing so I was looking for alternatives by summer,” he adds.
Petersen applied at UP MassComm and it was there that he first encountered the film course at Diliman. A first glance at the curriculum’s subject offerings made him decide that this was going to be his life. Thankfully, he says, his parents took his decision well.
To understand his films, both Lisyun and 2 Cool, it’s necessary to see where Petersen is coming from. Both films tackle topics that are quite close to his heart—the idea of being the “other,” which in Petersen’s case is about being queer. “When I made my short film, I wanted it to be personal, I wanted to talk about my first love. I think I just wanted to talk about how hard it was to identify who I am now when I was in an all-boys school, with a Catholic upbringing, from a traditional family,” Petersen says. “I fell in love with my best friend then, and I didn’t know what to do with that. So that was my short film, which was my thesis film and it competed in Cinemalaya and many others.”
This openness to what’s very personal is palpable in his films. “It’s what I want to be, a deeply personal Kapampangan filmmaker who makes these kinds of films and, luckily, even if Lisyun was a short film, a lot took notice,” adds Petersen.
It wasn’t always like that, though. Back when he was studying film at UP, Petersen says he wrote an essay about what kind of filmmaker he would be, saying that he wanted to make a film under Star Cinema. In a sense, he was able to do that with 2 Cool, but meeting Jason Paul Laxamana gave Petersen a different perspective about how much a film could do. Laxamana, who also hails from Pampanga, had a vision of making a collective of Kapampangan filmmakers because of a burgeoning regional movement for film. There was Cinema Rehiyon that features films from various regions in the country and Laxamana took charge for Pampanga. Petersen was among the young filmmakers Laxamana tapped.
“That was how I realized I could make a film set in Pampanga, with the characters speaking in Kapampangan and imbibing the Kapampangan way of life,” Petersen says. Eventually, the group that Laxamana put together gave birth to the Kapampangan Cinema Movement. Now Petersen has a way to showcase two deeply personal things he’s extremely proud of, his heritage as a Kapampangan and his life growing up queer. It was also through Laxamana that 2 Cool fell on Petersen’s lap.
Petersen on the set of 2 Cool 2 be 4gotten, with script continuity supervisor Abigail Lazaro
“He saw my short film that was set in a high school in Pampanga, so he told me, ‘Read this,’ handing me the screenplay for 2 Cool, which he wrote. It was love at first sight,” Petersen recalls. “It was exactly the kind of film I wanted to make: set in the late ‘90s, and the things the characters go through, I experienced them while I was in an all-boys high school. We had classmates who were American or half-American because Clark Airbase was right beside my school.”
Cinema One, which also showed Lisyun, picked up 2 Cool and gave it a grant as part of their annual Originals film fest. “So even if I didn’t write it, it was something that was very much me,” Petersen adds. “I felt very lucky that Star Cinema, through Cinema One, picked it up. I was excited that the film was going to be distributed.”
But Petersen says it wasn’t all rosy. It was tough, considering the issues his film presented. Sure, being distributed by a big film company made a huge difference, but Petersen had to deal with the reality that not everyone is going to understand the film or see it for what it is. He had cinema owners telling him that nobody is going to watch his film. Then there was also the MTRCB which gave it an R-rating. But he remained undaunted. “Being an independent filmmaker here in the country is not just about directing. You’re going to have to go through everything, even the distribution. Nobody’s going to care about your film as much as you do,” he says.
Apart from being deeply personal, Petersen says his films are honest. And that’s the main responsibility of a filmmaker to his audience, to not let them watch films that are not honest. “Are you honest in portraying your characters? Is your film honest in telling a story? It all goes back to that. Your audience holds on to your film because they believe in something,” says Petersen.
Petersen with Khalil Ramos
Asked about how he wants to be remembered as a filmmaker, Petersen couldn’t immediately give me an answer, not because he didn’t have an idea of what he wanted to be known for, but because he was genuinely shy about putting himself up on a pedestal. He did say one thing, though. “The reality is, different filmmakers have different reasons for doing what they do,” Petersen says. “And I guess I always want to talk about queerness, and it’s not necessarily just about gender—because being queer is being the ‘other.’ Of course I have firsthand experience of it, and there’s really that pain, like going through something that you know scars you for life. And then you see situations that are worse than what you’ve gone through. I can’t believe that we’re in 2018 and things like rampant killings are still happening. It’s not yet over, and I think I need to tell these stories.”
He tells me about the next film he plans to work on, which harps on these issues while also still carrying the same vibe his previous films had—with youth characters and possibly with Pampanga as the setting.
I asked him about that, why his films always featured young people. “A big part of me would like to keep telling stories about the youth—to the Filipino youth, to be specific—in whatever way, in whichever form. I would like to think I would stay young forever by telling stories about the youth,” he adds half-jokingly. “But it’s true. When I saw All These Sleepless Nights, the term ‘reminiscence bump’ flashed at the start of the movie. It’s a term in psychology that says it is our youthful memories that shape who we are. Aside from talking about my experiences when I was younger, I guess it’s really the youth that I want to talk to. And with hope they pick something up from these films, carrying it with them as they grow up.”