MANILA, Philippines - They were the palaces in the golden age of cinema, the grand venues of Philippine pop culture.
Now the nation’s stand-alone movie theaters are nearly forgotten, except for the notorious Family Theater in Pampanga immortalized in the Brillante Mendoza film, Serbis, as a squalid-sex den.
In Quiapo, Howie Severino (photo) and his documentary team explore one of these dilapidated remnants of cinema’s glory days, a theater that hosted glamorous premiere nights of the biggest box-office hits. They find an old janitor who lives there immersed in its glorious history and sordid present.
The theater in Quiapo today is neither cinematique nor sex den, but a busy hive of diversions that have helped make the classic way of watching movies a thing of the past.
Join Howie as he discovers what’s left of these palaces of Philippine cinema tonight on GMA 7’s I-Witness.