 |
| Open Endings |
Friendship and romantic feelings frequently become entangled for a group of women living in Manila in Nigel Santos’ Open Endings, which is screening as part of Queer East 2026. Coming six years after the Filipina director’s début, it’s a complicated drama with a lot of humour which, for anyone who has inhabited similar circles, will feel very true to life. Nigel agreed to answer some questions about the film’s development, its characters, and what she wanted to say.
Jennie Kermode: How much are the stories in Open Endings influenced by your own personal experiences?
Nigel Santos: The characters in Open Endings are actually inspired by combinations of people Keavy Vicente (Open Endings’ scriptwriter,) and I know in real life. As queer women in our thirties living in the Philippines, there’s this funny but very real experience where, if you enter a queer space in the city, there’s a huge chance you’ll run into your ex, your friend’s ex, or your ex’s ex. Everyone somehow knows each other and is casually okay with it, because most people have eventually decided to become friends. And so that messiness, intimacy, awkwardness, and familiarity became a big part of the film.
While the storylines themselves aren’t autobiographical in a literal sense, emotionally they’re very personal to us. In many ways, the film feels like a time capsule of who we were in our thiirties, something we can look back on years from now and still recognise parts of ourselves in.
JK: It's a shocking moment when Charlie is asked to choose between her friends and her girlfriend. Do you think that the importance of the love between friends is too easily dismissed in most films about romance?
NS: It’s also important to understand the context of that moment. Charlie is being asked by her girlfriend, Rafa, to choose because Rafa is trying to protect her own boundaries. I don’t think the film is necessarily saying Rafa is wrong for feeling that way. Sometimes love becomes complicated because people have different capacities, comforts, and emotional limits.
But in general, yes, I do think films often treat friendship as a side story, when in reality friendships can shape us just as deeply as romantic relationships do, sometimes even more. For queer people especially, friendships can become chosen families. They become the people who witness your becoming. So losing them can feel just as painful as heartbreak. And Open Endings wanted to sit with that complexity instead of simplifying it into who’s right or wrong.
JK: The film has been described as focused on ‘alternative lifestyles’ but it doesn’t feel like that to me. Do you think that the conventions of romance films have given people a misleading idea of what real relationships look like?
NS: If the 'alternative lifestyle' people are referring to is the idea of being friends with your exes, then yes, that’s something we rarely see, especially in Philippine cinema. There are many reasons for that. The Philippines is still a predominantly Catholic country, same-sex marriage is still illegal, divorce is still not allowed, and many rights afforded to queer people in other parts of the world still don’t exist here. Even films about queer women only come around once in a while in local theatres, so in many ways queer life is still seen as 'alternative'.
But inside queer communities, especially in Metro Manila, being friends with your exes is actually pretty common. Queer spaces are small, people know each other, relationships overlap, histories overlap, your ex becomes your friend, your friend dated your ex, or everyone just eventually learns how to coexist in the same spaces.
I also think romance films have conditioned people to believe that love should always be clear and easy to define. But real relationships are rarely like that: some people love each other deeply and still end up hurting each other, some people stay in each other’s lives even after the romance is gone. That’s really what we wanted to show in Open Endings. Before anything else, we wanted the relationships to feel human, and that queer love is not fundamentally different from heterosexual love. We fight, we get jealous, we make mistakes, we hold on, we let go. So centring this very specific queer experience (staying friends with exes and learning how to exist around people you once loved) was a very conscious choice for us. Not because we wanted it to feel 'alternative', but because for many queer people, this is just normal life.
JK: There’s just one scene of direct homophobic harassment. Did you want to acknowledge that it exists without letting it define your characters’ lives and decisions?
NS: Homophobic harassment happens every day. If you ask queer people, especially queer women, almost everyone has a story about being harassed in public. What’s painful is that sometimes it even happens inside spaces where you’re supposed to feel safe. We included that scene because it’s part of everyday queer life. We didn’t want to sensationalise it or turn it into a dramatic plot device. The man who harasses Charlie could be any random stranger, but he could also easily be someone you know. That’s what makes it scary and ordinary at the same time.
But at the same time, I didn’t want the characters to exist only as victims of homophobia. Of course that reality affects people deeply, but queer lives are also full of joy, humour, intimacy, friendship, mistakes, and love. Queer people still laugh, flirt, get drunk, fight over petty things, grow apart, and fall in love again. I think that’s what we wanted to protect in the film: the idea that queer people deserve to be seen as full human beings, not just through the lens of suffering.
JK: How important is Manila to the film? Do you think that these events would have happened in the same way in a different city in the Philippines?
NS: Open Endings is set in Metro Manila, particularly in Quezon City, and that is a very important element to the film because it gives the characters a certain kind of freedom where queer women can openly exist, hold hands in public, meet communities, and just live more freely. Quezon City has really become an important space for LGBTQIA+ people in the Philippines because of how openly supportive and progressive it has been over the years, so that visibility in the film is both something joyful and, in many ways, still a form of resistance.
That’s also why the characters’ identities are not treated as the main conflict all the time. We weren’t interested in making a film where queerness itself was the problem. We wanted to follow these women as they move through everyday life like friendships, work, heartbreak, responsibilities, love, getting older.
But at the same time, I don’t think the story would feel exactly the same if it happened somewhere else in the Philippines. The character of Marikit/Kit, for example, is openly part of the lesbian community in Metro Manila, but her family in the province still doesn’t know she’s queer because they’re religious. That’s a very real experience for many Filipinos. There’s often a difference between the freedom you experience in the city and the version of yourself you still have to hide when you go back home.
I also think it’s important that the film ends outside Metro Manila, in Batangas. The emotional texture changes there. Metro Manila feels noisy, crowded, and fast, while the province feels quieter and more exposed in a different way. It becomes a space where the characters can no longer hide behind distractions and are finally forced to sit with their feelings honestly.
JK: How did you go about finding a group of actors with the right chemistry to make the strong friendships in the film believable, and how did you keep the performances in balance?
NS: Chemistry was honestly the most important thing in the film because, at the end of the day, Open Endings is really about friendship, friendships between people who also share romantic history with each other (which adds a completely different emotional layer to everything). We first invited actors to do online readings with us, then shortlisted them based on how they individually understood and portrayed the characters. But being good individually wasn’t enough. We also had to make sure they could genuinely blend with the rest of the group.
So we organised face-to-face chemistry tests where different shortlisted actors mixed and matched scenes with one another. That was the moment we really saw who Hannah, Charlie, Mihan and Kit were going to be. I wasn’t looking for actors who only worked well in dramatic scenes. I was looking for people who could genuinely feel like they had years of shared history together.
After casting, we also conducted character workshops, SOGIE (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression) workshops, and intimacy coordination workshops so the actors could feel safe, informed, and comfortable with each other. That trust was very important to the film. During the process, I paid attention to very small things: how they listened to each other, how natural the silences felt between them, even how they laughed off-camera.
As a director, I also tried not to over-control the performances. I wanted the actors to react naturally and genuinely to each other. A lot of the emotional balance in the film came from building trust between them first before focusing on the scenes themselves.
JK: Although there are happy and sad moments throughout the film, there’s a distinct tonal shift at the end when Amihan faces up to her feelings for Hannah. How did you work with the actors to create this effect?
NS: That particular scene becomes quieter because Amihan finally stops running away from herself. Throughout the film, many emotions are hidden through humour, distractions, responsibilities, friendships, and all the noise of everyday life. But by the end, there’s nowhere left to escape emotionally. So the performances had to feel more exposed, more vulnerable, and still. With the actors, we talked a lot about restraint. I didn’t want the ending to feel like a big dramatic climax. I wanted it to feel more like someone finally becoming honest with themselves after avoiding their feelings for so long, that honesty can sometimes feel quieter, but also more devastating.
I also think the shift in tone comes from exhaustion. By that point in the story, the characters have already spent so much energy trying to hold themselves together, trying to act okay, trying to move on, and eventually, there’s no performance left, only truth.
JK: How do you feel about the film screening at Queer East?
NS: It honestly means a lot to me, and to the whole team.
As a Filipino filmmaker, you make films hoping they connect with people beyond your own circles, but you never fully know if they will. So having the film travel to Queer East Festival and be embraced by an international audience feels very emotional and surreal.
What moves me most is realising that even though the film is deeply rooted in Filipino experiences, people from completely different places still recognise themselves in it. And I think that’s the beautiful thing about cinema, the details may be specific, but the emotions such as longing, grief, and love are universal.
It also feels incredibly surreal and overwhelming in the best way because, as of answering this, our screening is already sold out. We’re really grateful to everyone who bought tickets and showed interest in the film. It honestly means so much to us, especially for a small independent Filipino queer film travelling this far.
We’re also deeply thankful to Queer East and Fire and Ice Media for making this possible and for giving space to stories like ours to be seen and celebrated internationally.
