The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
By Boy Villasanta
Controversial and fastidious filmmaker Jade Castro is back to the grind.
After being indiscriminately accosted in a bucolic town somewhere in Quezon Province early last year for a crime he surely wasn’t even an accomplice, Jade and three of his companions suffered, endured and languished a jail term that lasted for months.
Castro was hailed by his local film community colleagues as an innocent man of arson and demanded his immediate release.
The young, progressive director of award-winning films such as “Endo” and “Zombadings (Patayin sa Shokot si Remington)” and his three companions were eventually freed from the Catanauan Municipal Jail for lack of jurisdiction and illegality of their arrest.
Jade has since finished a film and has been working on other creative projects.
He has wrapped up an interesting coming-of-age movie that he and his producer Alemberg Ang have exclusively presented to a select audience recently.
“This is the film I made after I was unjustly jailed,” said Castro before screening “All the Things I Leave You,” a Boys Love (BL) initially meant for a web series at the Cinema 12 of Gateway Mall in Cubao last week.
As a Quezonin, I was reminded of Jade’s plight as a fall guy when I went to Catanauan town in the province of Quezon on Black Saturday as a guest to the paternal family reunion of cousins in my maternal ties held in a beach resort.
I felt angry and embarrassed with our justice system when I thought of the fragile-looking Jade charged with setting an e-bus on fire right in the strip of the road I treaded on.
And then the invite to watch his latest screen outing.
While I was inside the dark hall of the cinema watching his latest masterpiece, one couldn’t help but wonder if Castro wasn’t freed at once this crowd would be deprived of his freewheeling treatment of a worthwhile BL story.
When I asked Ang the theatrical exhibition playdate of the title, he replied optimistically: “Naghahanap pa po kami (We are still looking for theaters).”