Never Knew Love Like This Before

As a filmmaker, I have always been drawn to stories that resist polish. When we lived in a cramped apartment along Adriatico, I saw how people—sex workers, alcoholics, street hustlers—were reduced to labels, never asked for their stories. In film school, I was taught to aspire toward clean frames and professional sheen, but that language never felt like mine. It excluded the rawness, the grit, the messiness that shaped the people I grew up with—and myself.

Perslab is my refusal of that standard. At its core, it follows Gino, a 13-year-old boy who discovers his father’s hidden life and begins catfishing Giliw, a trans woman from the same nightlife underworld. What starts as an act of deception unfolds into an unlikely bond that forces Gino to confront desire, morality, and the confusing tenderness of growing up. His story is messy, flawed, and imperfect—just like the world I knew, and just like the people society often refuses to see in their full humanity.

Stylistically, the film embraces the raw textures of early 2000s Filipino pop culture—television static, pixelated phone screens, the so-called “bad taste” of Jejemon aesthetics. Handheld camerawork, overexposure, and grainy imperfections are not mistakes but deliberate choices. They echo memory more than mastery, feeling more than control. The film is less about presenting a neat narrative than about immersing the audience in the chaotic, vulnerable confusion of a boy stumbling his way into identity.

This project also critiques the very institution that shaped me. Film school preaches “good taste” and industry polish, yet rarely provides the tools to achieve them. What it does provide is a framework of aspiration—to be seen, to be marketable, to be legitimate. Perslab pushes back against that contradiction. It asks: what images become possible when we stop striving for approval, and instead embrace the imperfection of our own lived realities?