Jadaone Launches Ilaya Ilaya With Women-Led Slate, Netflix Romcom — SkimNews

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- Antoinette Jadaone launches Ilaya Ilaya production outfit with longtime collaborator Reign Anne De Guzman, who worked alongside her at Star Cinema, aiming to champion Filipino cinema, women-led stories, and unappreciated genres.
- Birdsong, the slate's lead project, is a found-footage horror film directed by Pam Miras about an ornithologist seeking a mythical bird and closure over her partner's disappearance a decade earlier; it won the Kantana Sound Studio Asian Project Award at Bangkok International Content Market 2026.
- Chandra Catacutan And The Curse Of The Fuchsia Moon casts Eugene Domingo as the eldest daughter of a manananggal from Philippine folklore, in a supernatural comedy directed by Tim Rone Villanueva whose Child No. 82 caught Jadaone's attention at Cinemalaya.
- Crème de la Crème, a coming-of-age whodunnit directed by Irene Emma Villamor and written by Glenn Barit, 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.
- Boldstar, Jadaone's return to directing, stars Angelica Panganiban in a dark comedy produced by Bianca Balbuena; the project won the CJ Entertainment Prize at the Asian Project Market in 2019 and was later selected for the Berlinale European Co-Production Market in 2020, but was delayed by Panganiban's pregnancy, Jadaone's work on Sunshine, and Balbuena's leadership at the now defunct Anima Studios.
- Ilaya Ilaya is expanding into television with Jadaone 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.
- Maris Racal will make her stage debut in an immersive, choose-your-own-adventure adaptation of Sunshine directed by Mikko Angeles, expanding the film's questions around agency, complicity, and choice beyond the screen.
Why it matters: Jadaone is converting her Berlinale momentum and Sunshine's sold-out local run into a vertically integrated production platform that bundles film, Netflix series, and immersive theater — giving Filipino genre filmmakers (notably women) an alternative funding path outside traditional studio systems, while keeping creative control anchored with Jadaone and De Guzman after Balbuena's Anima Studios folded.
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