Online film “Secrets” as a moving picture postcard

Award-winning filmmaker Jose Javier Reyes’ latest screen work “Secrets,” a Viva Films’ project that has been streaming in Vivamax isn’t only a daring and thoughtful narrative about unleashing fantasies and criminal minds, it is also a series of feel-good visuals of beautiful sceneries shot in vibrant, lively imagery like picture postcards or paintings except they’re in motion.

Director of Photography (DoP) Jan Oliver Evangelista, also popularly known as Jeyow Evangelista, is able to capture the beauty of nature succinctly in his interplay of light and shadow, brightness and dullness, lines and symmetry, perspective and movement etc.

Dipaculao town in Aurora Province—the setting of the story although the narrative is fictitious has come to life once again—this time is a reel landscape.

We are witness here to the country atmosphere of Dipaculao as the cinematography leads us to the magnificent topography of its outskirts, the gathering clouds at dusk or the peeping of the sun at dawn, the swelling and rushing of the waves to the shore and back to the heart of the sea etc. all shot in splendored lens defying vision.

Meanwhile, the characters are as colorful as the natural gifts of the environs of a beachfront worthy of a postcard design for humans are also fragments of a scenery to add dimension to the development of the narrative no matter happy or dark as the female lead Janine (Janelle Tee) frolicking in the sand and discerning the wicked side of another resort guest Leo (Felix Roco) until she irresistibly fell to his traps to break free her sexual desires. Leo’s provocation on Janine’s boyfriend Christian (Benz Sangalang) to unbridle his gayness to a revengeful tragic end where he crushed and inserted a beer bottle on Leo’s back.