Where are the sapphic films?
In the past three years, as a film educator and film critic, I have had the opportunity to watch several film theses from different schools, panel at screenwriting workshops (where I’ve read scripts by upcoming filmmakers), and join screening committees of different festivals, watching short films by new voices in the industry.
What I’ve noticed is the large amount of sapphic short films—movies about the female queer experience—in many of these activities. A lot of them are coming-of-age stories, with young women discovering their desire for other women. Other stories treat it as a matter-of-fact, a casual tone that presents it as a normality.
The amount of female queer stories I see in the background—written, shot, and produced by young filmmakers—that do not always get mainstream exhibition led me to wonder about sapphic films. Where are they? If pressed, only a handful of movies about lesbians come to mind: “Ned’s Project,” “Ang Huling Cha Cha ni Anita,” and the three films of Sam Lee, which are “Baka Bukas,” “Billie & Emma,” and “Rookie.”
As a gay man, it’s my blindspot. Sure, I love “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” It’s a film I’ve even included in my course syllabus on Film Criticism. But the other films of that theme are not in my algorithm.
The uphill climb for sapphic films
So where are the sapphic films? Especially here in the Philippines.
I invited filmmaker Sam Lee to hear her answer to that question, as she is the most prominent queer woman who makes movies and series. Our discussion opened my eyes about things I’ve taken for granted and my own unconscious biases, as a gay man. “I can only speak on my lived experience,” Lee begins, “so I guess we take it from the point of view of fans. They always ask, ‘When’s the next one?’ or ‘Make something for this person.’”
“And I think the biggest misconception—because we don’t really get to talk about it—but I’ve been pitching since ‘Rookie,’” she adds.
She tells me that she’s pitched over 10 times since “Rookie” premiered in 2023, but she’s met rejection many times in the past two years—even after winning the Audience Choice award at the 19th Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival.
“I don’t know [why] either,” she says quite frankly. “But we can’t take this in isolation. I can’t sit here and be like, ‘I actually haven’t been getting funding.’ We have to zoom out and look at the state of the cinema.”
She openly delves into audience viewership in the cinema, the return on investment (ROI) of streaming services, and how the status of the industry is affecting filmmaking as a whole. “If you look at it through that lens, the general vibe I’ve been getting, having gone through so many pitches,” she says, “is that a lot of producers are playing it safe because of the state of the movie industry.”
An underrepresented voice
From early on in the conversation, I’ve come to discover how prominent Lee thinks about the intersectionality of things. We’re not just talking about lesbian movies, but we are talking about feminism, patriarchy, and the political and economic effects that affect the Philippine film landscape—and even at some level, sociology.
She broadens the scope, saying, “We need to zoom out even more. We need to study how lesbians, bi women, transwomen, and queer women are seen in this country—not just through film, but through daily lived experience of discrimination. Of how many of them experience discrepancies in jobs, discrepancies in getting paid. And overall how women are seen in this country. Putting all those elements together, it makes sense on paper why male stories get more prioritized than female stories.”
The fact that I can’t name more than five Filipino lesbian-centered films from the top of my head in an instant despite my close engagement and relationship with cinema of all kinds is so telling to me.
Gay-centric films are easy to come by. Vice Ganda movies are always box office successes, while Jun Lana also gets to create queer films in the mainstream. Petersen Vargas just released his second queer film just last month and the buzz was able to ensure it made it to its second week, with the critics hailing it as a masterpiece (myself included).
But why is it so hard for stories about queer women not sharing in that spotlight?
Lee admits that it’s something she fights for when her films get released: that acknowledgement that there’s a market for it. “I don’t know if people find it funny that I always want to get Audience Choice because that’s the point I’m trying to make,” she says, laughing. “That we are bankable. That we can make money. That there’s an audience for it.”
“Patriarchy is so inherent in every aspect of this consumption process,” she shares, once again broadening the scope. “We ask young girls, ‘What kind of media will you prioritize watching?’ and a lot of girls like watching BL (boy’s love) and not GL (girl’s love). It’s just part of the culture.”
Different portrayals of desire
Lee wonders aloud why people like myself keep asking her for answers or solutions when the key is asking “everyone in every step of the process, like the audiences, the producers, the streamers, the directors.” She emphasizes that she can “keep making films, but if not a lot of people see the value of it then it’s never going to change.”
There are many important things that Lee talks about when talking about this subject. How building the audience means that she has to be “hyper-aware of how my films are received by people of different SOGIEs” because it’s important to see lesbian movies as not just some niche genre, but as something for everyone.
When a friend of hers saw “Rookie,” he told her how it was “nice to see desire in another way,” one that he could relate to as a gay man. Lee laughs, “If we can get gay male audiences on our side then that’s already a victory!”
She opines that male gay films “are focused on the physicality of desire,” but for her, being very aware of the “toxic representation of female-to-female physicality and desire historically in cinema as a whole,” she wants to focus on the subtleties. She wants her camera zeroing in on the expressions of it.
“That’s why I only get female DPs (director of photography) because I don’t want the male gaze to be a part of my work,” she adds, noting that, as a personal take, women’s bodies are so “heavily policed all the time in cinema and in real life.” She wants to explore how desire can be expressed in other ways—more emotional.
Filming love beyond the gaze
This is one of the reasons why her films are always shot so beautifully. It’s an artistic choice. “I don’t know if people always say this as a jab but they say na laging aesthetic ang films ko,” she says. “But it’s like that. I just want things to be beautiful. I want it to be aspirational.”
Film, to her, is a representation of reality, but it can also be an expression of a filmmaker’s wish or ideal. Movies, as a fictional work, can be what the artist can project into reality. It’s another function of the medium that people seem to forget.
So I ask her what would be ideal for her as a queer Filipina filmmaker. Her answer? “The tension is always ‘Do I wait for the absolute, most perfect conditions to make a film?’ And if you list it—queer actors playing queer roles, subject matter that is timely, socially relevant, and a happy ending. [Plus] a producer that is supportive, [who] gets it at every stage, from scripting to marketing—but then, if you always wait to tick all those boxes…” she trails off. We know the answer.
She ends with a compromise. “So my mode is to take as much as I can per project.”
