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| jerald napoles & dennis trillo |
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| the surfers of MINA ANUD: from left anthony falcon, dennis trillo, mara lopez, marc felix & jerald napoles |
KERWIN GO makes an auspicious full length film directorial debut in Regal’s crowdpleasing black comedy,“Mina Anud”, that opens in theaters this Wednesday. Its script won the Basecamp Colour Prize at Singapore’s Southeast Asia Film Financing (SAFF) Forum in 2017.
A graduate of Los Angeles Film School, Go’s film is based on a true story that happened in 2009 at an island called Mina Anud in Eastern Samar, when packs of high grade cocaine were washed away on its shores and how it drastically changed the erstwhile peaceful lives of its innocent villagers who resort to drug pushing.
It’s told from the point of view of two surfer friends who are based on nearby Borongan City: Dennis Trillo as Ding, a married man with a daughter who dreams of owning a van he can use as his livelihood, and Jerald Napoles as Carlo who takes care of his senile grandma and just wants to be a champion surfer.
They get hold of the cocaine from the fishermen who retrieved the floating packs from the sea and later sell them through Matteo Guidicelli as Paul, a TV commercial model who’s a drug trafficker to high end clients in Manila. But the agents of PDEA (Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency) led by Alvin Anson get to know about their nefarious activities, leading to some catastrophic results marked by ruthless violence.
The movie works mainly because of the splendid acting of Dennis and Jerald as the sparring partners who are both dumb to make the worst decisions that turn their otherwise uneventful life around. We just wish they were written off as more sympathetic characters, so that the viewers can really take their side and cheer for them.
Giving them excellent support are Matteo Guidicelli as the don-like go between who holds a bacchanalian party in his condo unit that both Dennis and Jerald will not soon forget (how we wish his character is also given its own kind of arc or closure), Alvin Anson as the merciless PDEA agent who has his own selfish motives, Dione Monsanto as Dennis’ wife who cheats on him and Lou Veloso as the island’s barangay captain who learns how to connive with the PDEA on how to profitably dispose of their illegal merchandise.
We just don’t fully appreciate where the story went. Someone dies who doesn’t deserve to die and someone who is more deserving to die survives. Of course, we wont say here who they are. To find out, you have to watch the movie for yourselves.
