How a series of serendipities helped a women-led artistic team bring Gabriela Serrano’s sophomore short dream-timeTM to life. When you enter the UP Film Institute Media Center, you will be greeted by thick smoke, pink and green lights, and a giant sign that says “Elaine.” From the corner of the room, Gabby Padilla enters the frame wearing a sparkling silver dress, and a blowout that fits right in with the early 1990s.
The room goes quiet as the track switches from NCT 127 to an unreleased OPM song and the band behind her begins to play. As Padilla begins to lip sync with a microphone on hand, the crowd around her leans in, heads bobbing to the beat. The scene feels like it’s ripped from a ’90s music video on MTV but it’s happening in real-time.
As this happens, Gabriela Serrano is fastened to the monitor. A clipboard of her shot list and storyboards in her arms, and a team of women forming a halo of support around her. They’re halfway through the first day of a five-day shoot for her sophomore short dream-timeTM .
The last time Serrano was on set was in 2021 for her debut short Dikit , a silent film that reimagined Jose Nepomuceno Jr’s lost short by queering the myth of the manananggal using the split screen format. Shot guerilla-style at a resort in 2021, Dikit was a passion project crafted by her and her sister Mariana, star and co-writer of both Dikit and dream-timeTM . But as it accumulated prizes from Cinemalaya, Binisaya, and Singapore, Dikit became a passport to a cinematic landscape they thought inaccessible to them until now.
dream-timeTM took a two-year detour before Serrano even entertained the idea of filming it. The pearl of the narrative emerged during the pandemic: when their mother brought home her call center work for the first time. Both operating on American time, Serrano would hear her mother’s interactions with her clients, how she’d tense up around them when they became demanding.
“That struck me profoundly, seeing this woman I’ve put on a pedestal my whole life be reduced to a voice,” Gaby says. She began thinking of the BPO industry and how voices on the other end had histories entirely unknown to the callers. From these experiences, Serrano wrote a straightforward drama and submitted it to QCinema.
But when the project wasn’t shortlisted, she expanded the idea instead of giving up on it, sublimating her difficulties with sleep into the narrative, leading her to imagine a future where people are incentivized through dreams. At the end of a five-week stretch of writing, she had a treatment for upcoming feature Please Bear With Me , which she submitted to Singapore’s Southeast Asian Film Lab. While waiting for the results, Serrano had gotten into Cinemalaya , where she met producer Gale Osorio, who handled the production company Archipelago with partner and filmmaker Keith Deligero.
Serrano admired the duo from afar, especially after hearing how they mentored the likes of Maria Estela Paiso, Jaime Morados, and JT Trinidad. “When Gaby won and we heard her speech about young directors and women filmmakers, she was just saying all the right things,” says Osorio. “She clearly had so much potential.
” Deligero reached out at first to screen Dikit at the Binisaya Film Festival, where it eventually won the top prize. When Please Bear With Me was shortlisted in the Southeast Asian Film Lab, Deligero approached Serrano asking if she had a producer. It didn’t take much for Serrano to say yes, seeing how the two invested in “a rookie’s voice.
” While Osorio mined the script for meaning, Deligero honed in on Serrano’s voice as a director. The two nurtured the feature’s development, practicing with Serrano to solidify her director’s statement and pitching skills, leading to wins at prestigious labs and project markets in Singapore, Korea, Spain, and Canada. As Serrano pitched the feature across the world, the need for a second short film began resurfacing.
So in the latter half of 2023, the Serrano sisters co-wrote dream-timeTM , a short which sprung from the same universe as Please Bear With Me but was centered around three women whose lives intertwine because of a newly developed software: a young woman leaving home, an overworked call center agent, and a fading popstar. A series of serendipities led to the assembly of the film’s women-led artistic team. Agot Isidro was the first actor on board.
With the actress’ beginnings as a singer on The Sharon Cuneta Show and her extensive work in musical theater and the screen arts, Serrano felt comfortable approaching her because they were batchmates in the Ricky Lee screenwriting workshops. After being sent the deck, which contained her name and picture for months, Isidro immediately said yes. In early December 2023, Vogue Philippines invited the Serrano sisters to a dinner with other filmmakers, where they sat across multi-hyphenate creative Kim Jones.
Serrano had been familiar with Jones through her boss Paco Raterta. When Jones asked if the two were developing anything and they began sharing the details of both Please Bear With Me and dream-timeTM , Jones lit up and offered her support. “We needed an executive producer who understood the world we were making and it was a no-brainer,” Serrano says.
Beyond the sponsorships and logistical assistance, Jones shaped the look and styling within the film. “Being a ’90s kid, I feel like she had a lot of input about the era.” Over the Christmas break, the three swapped comprehensive styling decks, with the Serrano sisters showing their early pegs Regine Velasquez, Sharon Cuneta, and Geneva Cruz, while also incorporating influences like Faye Wong, The Cocteau Twins, and even Wham! Jones eventually sourced a pair of silver dresses from Los Angeles that would be used in the shoot.
When Padilla’s take ends, she huddles with the other women around the rushes. Serrano signals her production managers Mikki Castro and Kim Vivar to prepare for the next sequence, which requires a black Ford Lynx to enter the studio. Working with bigger names and a bigger production combined with the pressures of a sophomore follow-up have been intimidating for the sisters.
But it helps that on the wings of the set are several of their family and friends, including their parents, who are ready to serve as extras. The Serrano sisters have been adamant that the girls be surrounded by people who were there from their Dikit days, not only as an emotional cushion but as a way to establish the sisters’ cinematic universe. “It’s easy to be reminded of [the sense of play] though because we’d have these big-budget meetings and we’d end the call and we’d just be in our room,” says Mariana, laughing.
“At the end of the day, we’re just two girls.” “Honestly, only now [does it] feel like the first film,” says Serrano. “I have a lot of impostor syndrome.
But all these connections have just been signs that there are people who really believe in what we want to do. Let’s keep going.”.
