Outlining the rise of Philippine slums alongside the historical development of Philippine urban cinema,
Slum Imaginaries and Spatial Justice in Philippine Cinema
makes a novel contribution to the cinema-city nexus through its interdisciplinary framework of film studies and human geography. It formulates the theory of the ‘slum chronotope’ as a theoretical tool to analyse narrative and genre formation in films that dialogue with Manila’s slum imaginaries, and makes the case for Philippine urban cinema – and Philippine urban history – as a significant vantage point from which to understand imaginaries of spatial justice.
With case studies that take off from
The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros
(2005) to
Respeto
(2017), this book is a powerful contribution to transnational cinema studies.