In This Family
What is it like coming out as a gay teen in the Philippines?
In a country imbued with traditional Catholic views, coming out is received with disapproval and anger, especially from one’s own family.
In This Family is a short documentary that looks at how one Filipino family reacts to having a gay son. Revisiting unreleased audio recordings of fights from inside his own home, documentary filmmaker Drama Del Rosario shares his story of being outed as a teenager, dealing with his family’s reaction, and the society’s percipience on homosexuality. Beyond coming out, the film speaks about how parents learn to embrace their children unconditionally. His story is one of thousands that needs to be heard and shared.
Director Biography
Drama Del Rosario is a documentary filmmaker from Quezon City, Philippines. He graduated from the Ateneo de Manila University with a Bachelor of Arts, Major in Communication, Magna Cum Laude. He was also the Program Awardee for AB Communication Batch 2016.
Among his notable works are the music videos of “Tama Lang” by Jolina Magdangal, “Dito (Acoustic Version)” by Inigo Pascual, and “Hanggang Kailan” by Angeline Quinto. His works have also been featured locally through ABS-CBN, Rogue.PH, Jesuit Communications Foundation, and UnionBank, as well as internationally in the USA, Canada, India, Japan, and Australia. In 2017, he worked with iamClaire to shoot the August 2017 and September 2017 covers featuring Bea Binene and Maureen Wroblewitz, respectively.
His premiere directorial work is “Popemania” (2015), a documentary on Pope Francis’ visit to the Philippines in January 2015, told through the lens of commercialism and sensationalism. This documentary has received accolades from international film festivals in Cebu, Melbourne, Delhi, Missouri, and New Mexico. It won the award for Best Short Documentary from the 2015 Gallup Film Festival in New Mexico, and was subsequently featured on CNN Philippines.
He also directed “The Big Fans” (2016), a documentary that exposes the casting secret behind the popular Filipino reality show, Pinoy Big Brother. This documentary has been featured in Cebu and Melbourne, and it was awarded the Best Thesis for 2016 from the Ateneo de Manila University Department of Communication.
Currently, he is taking the Master of Fine Arts in Documentary program at the New York Film Academy – Los Angeles.
Director Statement
Sharing my coming out story was an emotionally difficult process. For ten years, in a little external hard drive stashed inside the drawers of my desk, I had kept precious raw audio files of my parents scolding me for being gay. I do not know what compelled me to record these conversations back then when I was thirteen years old. Perhaps, I had a gut feeling that these recordings would be put to greater use. Today, listening to these recordings after a decade, I still feel the hurt, yet I am desensitized enough to openly speak about my story through film.
If anything, I hope the viewers of this documentary film would see how our family has grown beyond these homophobic recordings. But beyond this, in relation to my previous documentary films such as Popemania (2015), my film embraces how Filipinos are slowly breaking out of their traditional Catholic views. As such, I hope to tell more stories about the LGBTQ Filipino in the future.
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