I have been trying to expose myself to local independent cinema for a very long time, actually maybe too long. My undergraduate thesis was already an attempt to understand the relationship between independent cinema and social issues. Maybe accessibility is also a question of whether we have built an ecosystem capable of sustaining independent cinema outside Manila. If a Filipino independent film gets one screen and an internationall blockbuster gets ten, it is not necessarily because the cinema hates Filipino filmmakers. And perhaps that is why this conversation matters so much to me.Because I don’t want independent cinema to remain a Manila privilege.