WIDOWS

A Film that Revived a Dying Culture

Each year the Cinemanila Film Festival continues it's legacy of glorifying timeless Filipino works in film.

This year's festival features Benito Baustista's documentary Harana, the lost art of serenading prevalent in old Philippines. It is the vanished tradition of the men who stood under windows and sang for the women they loved. This poignant memoir rekindles a connection with a cultural past before it is irrevocably lost.

To promote Cinemanila, and films it has immortalized onscreen, we revived this dying culture.

We launched this film, casting the long-forgotten women once wooed by haranistas, now wrinkled and gray. And this time, they are doing the singing - the unheralded songs of Harana, living through the voices of the women who once fell in love with them.