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MIFF 2018, XII: Meet the Baby of the International Jury, Baby Ruth Villarama

Hailing from the Tagalog (main dialect) speaking heartland of the Philippines, a country of several thousand islands, Baby Ruth is easy to get along with. She also reveals that it is easy to trace somebody in her country based on the surname, which is specific to an island!

Known for films like Sunday Beauty Queen, Jazz in Love and Little Azkals, Baby Ruth Villarama did an MA in Film Distribution and Marketing, from the Birmingham City University (BCU), UK. She has just begun a stint as a new lecturer of the UP Diliman Film Institute, for the semester that opened just this month, January 2017.

Besides her production work, she does a lot at the National Committee on Cinema, which is part of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, based in Manila. She serves as Secretary, Independent Cinema Sector.

She has undergone specialised training for esteemed overseas institution such as CICAE (International Confederation of Art Cinemas); the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and the Pitch Conference at TokyoDocs, among others. About documentaries in the Philippines, she says, “It's a slow and painful process for my country, but my year-long education at BCU gave the inspiration to carry on. What I loved about the course is that it showed the process of the film business by sharing how movies of different genres came to life. Their challenges and triumphs became a path for us to be hopeful about our careers in the film industry. The Cannes Film Festival work placement and the live project to mount a film screening is something to remember.”

Sunday Beauty Queen won the best picture award at the Metro Manila Film Festival last year. The recognition came after a long, hard period. She has been involved in film co-productions for more than 10 years. Baby Ruth started producing documentary contents for ABS-CBN before she started to create contents for international organisations and, eventually, co-produce independent films with film-makers and other producers in the region. She’s part of a team that puts up Voyage Studios and DokyuPeeps – a start-up that pushes Filipino stories to reach a more global audience.

As a child, she was always looking forward to watching the day’s National Geographic Society special. Before being a successful director, Villarama took on every vital role in making a film—a photographer, a production assistant, a researcher, and even a transcriber.The Journalism alumna graduated in 2000, with a fascination for photo-journalism. She initially worked as a nightlife photographer too.

In an unexpected turn of events, Villarama eventually became one of the members of the first all-Filipino documentary production team for “Asia’s Titanic,” a National Geographic feature. Years later, the director reached great heights in documentary film-making, creating a number of films, such as the 2011 short, A Letter to Ifugao. Sunday Beauty Queen was the crowning glory.

One Sunday, four years ago, Villarama and her husband, producer-editor Chuck Gutierrez, chanced upon a Filipino beauty pageant taking place in one of Hong Kong’s busiest streets. During their courtesy call, the Philippine Consulate suggested that they create a film about the event. “Filipino maids in Hong Kong join beauty pageants not to win some ‘cheap’ crown but to get something beyond money. It’s a real-life Cinderella story we have overlooked for many years and it’s important the world knows about them,” felt Villarama.

Baby Ruth Villarama’s narrative/documentary entitled Jazz in Love focuses on two men in the midst of an international and intergenerational romance that has could happen only with modern technology. Jazz Tigaldao is a 22-year-old Filipino male nurse who has been studying German in order to qualify for a fiancé visa. He is eager to marry his Facebook boyfriend of 11 months (who lives in Berlin) and get to Germany asap. The boy-friend is Theo Rutkowski, 56-year, who works with the military, who is committed to a life as a single.