Neomanila

Neomanila (2017)

Toto, a teenage orphan, is recruited by a notorious death squad. Irma, the groups leader, soon becomes a maternal figure to the young boy. As the two form a familial bond, their loyalties will be put to the test when one of their targets turns out to be a familiar face.

Date of release
2017-10-20
TMDB
5.4 / 10 (10)
Runtime
1h 41m
Genres
Crime, Thriller
Director
Mikhail Red

Casting

Interesting facts

Neomanila is a 2017 Philippine neo-noir thriller film directed and co-written by Mikhail Red. Set in modern Manila amid the war on drugs, it tells the story of Irma, a hitwoman who trains the young orphan Toto to become a professional assassin. It premiered at the 2017 Quezon City International Film Festival from October 20–28, before having a Philippine theatrical release on March 13, 2019. The Hollywood Reporter described the film as a "slick thriller".

Production

Neomanila was the third feature film of writer-director Mikhail Red, the first two being Rekorder (2013) and Birdshot (2016). According to Red, he had the idea for Neomanila after watching an interview conducted by the BBC, which had gone viral, of a married couple who both worked as hitmen at night.

Principal photography on the film began August 2017 and lasted 11 days, which is a relatively short schedule compared to the two-year period Red spent completing Birdshot. Although Red believes that shooting for two years is optimal for a production schedule, he elected releasing Neomanila immediately that year because he felt that extrajudicial killings (EJK), especially during the Philippine drug war, were a "very relevant" subject tackled in t…

I guess what makes it different from most EJK-themed films—and there's a lot being done now—is the perspective. It's basically about people caught in the middle of the drug war, literally, because they're the middlemen. They're morally ambiguous. I'm always interested in that, where you have very likable criminals, going up against corrupt cops. It's very gray.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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