May Bukas Pa

When a widow who has just stolen her husband's ashes collides with a foreigner twenty years late to say goodbye, their accidental journey across the Philippines becomes a quietly absurd detour through guilt, loss and unexpected connection.

Snapshot

About this trailer

Previz trailer: an AI-rendered animatic of the storyboard with a scratch score. Not footage; the film is not yet shot.

Previz on this page: the trailer and all ten music videos, AI animatics of the storyboard rendered from the script. All of it is draft, in review with the filmmaker.

Contact: hi@undercurrentstudios.com

Poster

Market

Intimate and cinematic, funny and sad, a little absurd, unmistakably Filipino without needing genre to define it. The humour, the chaos, the generosity, the food, the music, strangers feeding you, everyone somehow becoming responsible for everyone else.

Synopsis

Manila. A year after her husband Ernie died, Kaya still lives in his mother's house. His ashes sit on the altar, the aunties whisper at the card table, and his mother tells her to her face that she knows what she did. When Kaya finally snatches the urn and runs, she runs straight into Luc, a Belgian man who has just been robbed of everything but a folded photograph and a scrap of paper with an address on it. He is twenty years late to say goodbye to Nicasia, the woman who raised him, and she is dying in a village ten hours away.

The urn shatters. What is left of Ernie goes into a fast-food cup with his name on a strip of yellow tape. Kaya pawns her wedding ring so that Luc can keep his grandfather's watch, fastens the watch on her own wrist as collateral, and tells him that wherever he is going, she is going too.

What follows is a road movie the way real people travel: a motel room the size of a closet, a provincial bus that loses a tire between the rice paddies, a baby born in the aisle, a seven-year-old boy nobody stays for, a barrio wedding under repurposed Christmas lights where an old man dances with someone only he can see. By the time Luc reaches Nicasia's bedside and hears her ask whether he has eaten yet, Kaya has run to the river with a clay pot of mung bean sprouts that a child has labelled with her husband's name, and finally said out loud the thing she has carried the whole way.

It is about grief, but it is not here to perform sadness. It is about connection, but only once the dust has settled and no one is looking.

Suggested cast

Further casting to come from the filmmaker.

Main characters

Kaya

Aina Dumlao

A widow. A year after her husband Ernie died she still lives in his mother's house, his ashes on the altar and his family's contempt at the table. She snatches the urn and runs, pawns her wedding ring for a stranger's watch, and follows him south with what is left of Ernie in a fast-food cup.

Luc

A Belgian man robbed of everything but a folded photograph and a scrap of paper with an address on it. He is twenty years late to say goodbye to Nicasia, the woman who raised him, and she is dying in a village ten hours away.

Nicasia

The nanny who raised Luc. When he finally reaches her bedside, she asks whether he has eaten yet.

Ernie

Kaya's late husband. Present the whole way: in an urn, then a cup with his name on yellow tape, then a clay pot of mung bean sprouts a child has labelled with his name.

Filmmaker team

Aina Dumlao

Writer | Director | Producer | Kaya · Undercurrent Films

Aina Dumlao is a Filipina-American writer, director, producer and actress with over a decade of credits across television and film. She wrote, starred in and co-directed the award-winning short Diwa; her acting credits include The Unusual Suspects (SBS, Hulu, Netflix), Sanzaru (Slamdance Grand Jury nominee), Ballers (HBO) and Grey's Anatomy (ABC). May Bukas Pa began with her mother, who, decades after being left to raise her daughter alone, wanted to travel ten hours by bus to collect the ashes of the man who left, simply because she didn't want him to be alone.

Producers: Aina Dumlao, Bru Muller, Corey Cooper.

Comparable films

From the filmmaker's materials:

Songs from the film

Ten original songs, one for each movement of the film, written from the screenplay: a widow's pre-dawn question, the gossip at the wake, a husband in a plastic cup, a pawnshop torch song, a foreigner everyone calls Joe, a motel night, a bus that never comes, a wedding waltz for a woman who isn't there, a nanny's lullaby, and the river. Sung in Tagalog, Taglish and English.

Listen: the ten songs and their previz music videosbeatriful.com/@maybukaspa · levelled listening drafts, not masters

Finance plan

To come from Undercurrent Films.

Documents

Screenplay complete; pages are furnished to producers and financiers on request through Undercurrent Films.