Madeleine Gallaga

Fidel tries to resume a normal life after the devastation wrought by his wife's death. He returns to his old friend Crispin and his wife Irene. A tentative effort with another woman fails, and Fidel finds himself in Irene's arms. That same evening, a young girl is brutally murdered. Fidel, unable to account for his whereabouts, is named the principal suspect, which later leads to his imprisonment. Crispin, meanwhile, learns of Irene's infidelity; his friendship is put to the test when Fidel escapes, gets wounded, and asks Crispin to kill him and put him out of misery.

A woman whose whole life is her art, but when she loses it she goes into a self-exile, only to be, hopefully, reinvigorated by a young boy daring to bring it all back.

A bride commits suicide on her wedding night. Years later, she is reincarnated as an actress-producer and tries to reveal her true story to the world.

A woman is thinking of abortion, against her firm faith and family's wants.

A gang of teenagers accidentally inherits a bag of drugs. They try to sell them back to their original gangster owners, but when that goes awry, they are reluctantly drawn into a protracted and bloody gang war. Meanwhile, they are neglected at home, and must deal with family abuse as well as the gangsters.

Fidel tries to resume a normal life after the devastation wrought by his wife's death. He returns to his old friend Crispin and his wife Irene. A tentative effort with another woman fails, and Fidel finds himself in Irene's arms. That same evening, a young girl is brutally murdered. Fidel, unable to account for his whereabouts, is named the principal suspect, which later leads to his imprisonment. Crispin, meanwhile, learns of Irene's infidelity; his friendship is put to the test when Fidel escapes, gets wounded, and asks Crispin to kill him and put him out of misery.

August 1950. The fortunes of three impoverished friends and their families abruptly change after an airplane crashes in a nearby mountain. They rush to the crash site along with all the villagers, not to help the victims but to plunder their valuables. A dead American passenger carried a large amount of money in his briefcase, which Mesiong, Ponsoy, and Jamin find and avariciously keep for themselves. But the town mayor gets greedy and, with his hirelings, abducts the three to divest them of their booty.

The story follows the Lorenzos and the Ojedas, the two land-owning clans in the island province of Negros, who were trying to cope and survive the war that lasted three tumultuous years, where they experienced or witnessed violence, blood, horror, and death. It is structured into three parts: Oro, a life of luxury and comfort in the city; Plata, a still-luxurious time of refuge in a provincial hacienda; and finally, Mata, a toilsome retreat deeper into the mountains. A war not only turned them into miserable people but also turned them into animals.