Jadaone Launches Ilaya Ilaya With Women-Led Philippine Slate — SkimNews
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- Antoinette Jadaone launched production company Ilaya Ilaya with longtime collaborator Reign Anne De Guzman, aiming to champion Filipino cinema, women-led stories, and filmmakers struggling outside traditional studio systems and festival funding cycles.
- The slate leads with Birdsong, a found-footage horror film directed by Pam Miras and written by Glenn Barit, about an ornithologist seeking a mythical bird on a remote mountain while mourning her partner's disappearance; it won the Kantana Sound Studio Asian Project Award at Bangkok International Content Market 2026.
- Boldstar, a dark comedy starring Angelica Panganiban and produced by Bianca Balbuena, marks Jadaone's return to directing; the project originally won the CJ Entertainment Prize at Asian Project Market 2019 and was selected for Berlinale European Co-Production Market 2020, with delays tied to Panganiban's pregnancy, Sunshine, and the shuttering of Anima Studios.
- Supernatural comedy Chandra Catacutan And The Curse Of The Fuchsia Moon stars Eugene Domingo as the eldest daughter of a manananggal whose children reunite when the creature suffers a stroke mid-air and can't return to her lower half; it's directed by Tim Rone Villanueva.
- Crème de la Crème, a coming-of-age whodunnit directed by Irene Emma Villamor, is partly inspired by a 2006 incident in which two male students laced a classmate's water jug with mercury nitrate at Philippine Science High School.
- Jadaone is showrunning an untitled romcom series for Netflix Philippines, co-written with Fatrick Tabada, marking her return to the genre nearly a decade after Love You To The Stars And Back — following her previous Netflix work on Replacing Chef Chico.
- Rounding out the slate is an immersive choose-your-own-adventure stage adaptation of Sunshine, to be directed by Mikko Angeles and written by Mika Regis, with Maris Racal returning to the role in her stage debut.
Why it matters: Jadaone is converting the momentum of Sunshine's Berlinale Crystal Bear into production infrastructure for an entire slate of Filipino filmmakers — including a Netflix Philippines romcom series, four films led by or starring women (Panganiban, Domingo, Estrada, Racal), and a theatrical extension of her signature work. For Philippine cinema, the launch creates a new vehicle specifically aimed at women-led stories and unappreciated genres that have struggled to find backing outside studios and festival circuits.
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