Filmmaker and De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde Multimedia Arts alumna Gabriela “Gaby” Serrano has once again been named Best Director in the Short Film category at the 22nd Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, this time for her dystopian sci-fi drama Elenita Elena Elaine.
The recognition further highlights Serrano’s distinct filmmaking voice and her continued contribution to contemporary Philippine cinema, particularly through stories that push genre boundaries while engaging with social realities.
Produced by Archipelago, Studio Dalaga, Key Pictures, Lunari Global, and Membrana Pictures, with support from the 2025 Momo Film Co Distribution Grant, Elenita Elena Elaine is set in a sleepless, dreamless Manila where dreaming itself has become an outsourced service. The film examines mother-daughter relationships, economic displacement, labor, and personal sacrifice through a speculative narrative that moves across different periods in the lives of three interconnected Filipino women.
The story follows a pop idol, a young graduate preparing to leave the country, and a call-center agent whose voice gradually fades amid exhausting late-night shifts. Their experiences reveal the personal costs of labor and survival within a system shaped by economic inequality and globalization.
Serrano drew from her own experiences in developing the film. She recalled a period when she and her mother worked remotely from their living room in Manila, with her mother handling foreign call-center support while Serrano worked as a series editor on FX’s Spirit Award-nominated The Choe Show.
“We worked alongside each other from our living room in Manila, and though our new jobs sustained our household, the darker sides of globalization took root inside our home,” Serrano shared. She described how endless night shifts, underpaid labor, and cultural gaps gradually affected their time, sleep, and hopes for the future.
The experience also became a space for mother and daughter to share dreams they had set aside, including Serrano’s aspiration to become a film director and her mother’s teenage dream of becoming a singer. These conversations became part of the emotional and speculative foundation of Elenita Elena Elaine, which explores how economic realities can force people to silence parts of themselves simply to survive.
Serrano is known for incorporating folklore, surrealism, and socio-economic realities into her work. She previously won Best Director and the Special Jury Prize at Cinemalaya 18 for the split-screen folk thriller Dikit, while Surface Tension, which she co-directed with her sister Mariana in 2025, won Best Short Film at QCinema’s QCShorts Lokal.
For Elenita Elena Elaine, Serrano reunited with her sister Mariana, who served as co-writer and actor. The creative team also includes executive producers Kim Jones, Gabie Tanjutco, and Mike Marks; producers Gale Osorio and Keith Deligero; cinematographer Kara Moreno; production designer Pauline Olarte; sound designers Dawr Toñacao and Deligero; musical scorer Andrea Ramos; and actors Agot Isidro and Gabby Padilla.
Serrano is currently developing her feature-length sci-fi project Please Bear With Me, a companion piece to Elenita Elena Elaine that further explores themes surrounding call-center labor. The project has received pitch recognitions from the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN), Festival du nouveau cinéma (FNC) Montréal, and the Southeast Asian Film Lab.
With another Cinemalaya Best Director award to her name, Serrano continues to establish herself as a filmmaker unafraid to explore unconventional genres and deeply personal stories, bringing Filipino experiences of labor, family, identity, and survival to increasingly wider audiences.
