Ahlyxon Leyva

During a film shoot where abuse is disguised as artistic direction, a comeback actress commits a devastating performance to survive, exposing how cinema can construct and legitimize violence. In Ang Lihim ni Teresa (Teresa's Secret), she enters a set where authority is absolute and cruelty is framed as discipline. As production unfolds, she loses control over body, emotion, and authorship, where survival is mistaken for consent. When violence escalates, she chooses to live, burying the truth as the director’s collapse is rewritten as myth. The set becomes a crime scene without witnesses. In the aftermath, she is praised for her “courage” while a sound technician retreats into silence. At a commemorative screening, celebration fractures, revealing cinema’s ability to transform violence into narrative and absolution. The myth of the Kataw appears briefly through Ang Lihim ng Kataw (The Secret of Kataw).

After years of imprisonment in the Middle East for a crime he did not commit, Lino finally returns to his small town. He hopes to relive his lost dreams and bring back everything that was taken away from him. With his red suitcase filled with misery and uncertainty, he reunites with his past. Revisiting what he left behind, he discovers that life went on without him. As he tries to fill the emptiness, he realizes that he is now the void.