Award-winning director Brillante Mendoza joined FEST 2025 as the final host of the week’s Training Ground Masterclasses. The session, titled “Behind the Scenes of Ma’ Rosa,” was dedicated to Mendoza’s unique approach to telling “urgent” stories on film of Mendoza’s native Philippines. 

“The Found School of Thought” is at the basis of Mendoza’s craft. In this original approach, Mendoza seeks to capture reality. He does not want scenes that appear choreographed or rehearsed. Rather, his films, which are sociological in nature and character-based, are naturalistic and as gritty and challenging as the situations they depict. 

Mendoza’s “Found” philosophy is applied throughout all aspects of his work. Everything from cinematography to set design to editing follows the “Found” philosophy, which strives to remove the glamor that many other styles of film add to enhance the storytelling and characterization. Mendoza’s approach is the opposite: he strips away the varnish so that the truth of the narrative and characters is front and center.   

Mendoza’s work is drenched in the sounds and colors of its settings. He recalled a Q&A at the Locarno Film Festival in which an audience member told him that his first feature film, Masahista (2005)—which won a Golden Leopard at the festival—had transported her to the Philippines. In sharing everyday stories from the ground level, Masahista “showed [Mendoza’s] soul.” Mendoza describes the words as “lightning that struck me,” and they continue to reverberate in his mind even after making over 20 more films since. 

Coming from a country that fails to invest adequately in culture and the arts renders filmmaking a challenging vocation. In the Philippines, “art, film, cinema are not a priority for the government,” and that means that government financial support is not something that Mendoza relies on. Because of this, he has learned to keep his productions as lean as possible, with shooting usually lasting only about one week. 

Mendoza explained that he does not give his performers a script. Rather, similar to the approach Scandar Copti described in his own masterclass earlier in the week, Mendoza stages situations and gives performers a few lines to work with. The stories Mendoza chooses to tell are born from something that disturbs him, especially social issues that afflict the most underprivileged members of Filipino society. 

Directors, Mendoza notes, “have the power to give people acknowledgment.” He wants to tell stories that “bother” him, and his prolific work reflects just how many of these experiences there are. “It’s about telling the story of the minority because if you don’t do it, who will?” 

When it comes to awards, Mendoza is modest. These have been his motivation for filmmaking. Instead, he insists that it is the characters that are the heart of his work: “I was the instrument that delivered their story . . . It’s the characters that deserve the honor.” 

• ⁠  ⁠Alexandra Rongione