Open Endings

Bluesky

When you live in a place where few people are open about being LGBTQ+, maintaining relationships becomes one of your top priorities. Charlie (Janella Salvador), Hannah (Jasmine Curtis-Smith), Kit (Klea Pineda) and Amihan (Leanne Mamonong) have been friends throughout their adult lives. During that time they have had crushes on one another, had one night stands, dated, fallen in and out of love and gone through messy break-ups, but they have always managed to rebuild their bond. It’s something they celebrate when times are good and rely on when times are hard. When the film opens, the other three are focused on supporting Hannah, who has recently been bereaved – but it will be what she does next that propels them into a new way of looking at their lives.

In cinema, romances begin with strangers and marriages generally end in divorce with little contact. In real life, there are rarely just tidy beginnings and endings. Director Nigel Santos intentionally plunges us into the middle of things, and although Charlie provides a potted explanation, it may be some time before you find your feet. She’s in an intense but troubled relationship with a newcomer to the Manila scene, Rafa, who can’t deal with the fact that she’s friends with her exes. This seems doomed, but frriends tell her that she shouldn’t worry about being single for long because she’s beautiful, intelligent and has very low standards. She also has a developing crush on Amihan, who has wowed them all by writing a successful children’s book, The Dog With No Name, but she’s in the classic position of the narrator concerned, first and foremost, with other people’s business, whilst her own emotional arc is a less conscious one.

The plethora of relationships in play here allows Santos to explore different aspects of present day Filipina lesbian experience. Although the city is gradually becoming a more accepting place, elsewhere different values hold sway. Kit, who is dating a married woman, finds her life an options shaped by the prejudices of an older generation still living out in the sticks. Charlie encounters lesbophobic sexual harassment in a bar – this could, the director told me, have realistically been shown many times, but although it represents a frequent experience, she didn’t want to suggest that her characters’ lives are dominated by it. Heterosexual life is clearly not all sunshine and roses either. Amihan worries about her mother, who keeps losing her heart to different men.

Perhaps inevitably, telling so many stories at once means that some are underdeveloped and others get lost, but that’s part of Santos’ point – that the narratives of real life are not neat, and individuals have to try to find their way through tangled dynamics which they may not fully understand. In deference to traditional narrative, there is one particular romantic thread that runs throughout, not obvious at first but discernable if you’re paying attention, leading to an emotional final scene which really gives the actors a chance to demonstrate their skills.

It’s always challenging to pull of this kind of ensemble storytelling. Open Endings, which screened as part of Queer East 2026, is not entirely successful, but it’s nonetheless an impressive effort from Santos at this early stage in her career, and an interestingly different way to engage with lesbian experiences. Setting aside the isolation often associated with individual narratives, it emphasises the primacy of community.

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