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Cities have a boiling point.  Like the 'Summer of Sam' in New York, or the Rodney King incident and fallout in Los Angeles, the individual people, each a tiny molecule of activity, can bump into one another slowly, raising the temperature, the kinetic energy, of a pocket to the point where the mounting pressure (an engine's overworked radiator) will have to find some sort of release.  So goes a particularly busy intersection in Pasay City, a market and subway intersection located inside metro Manilla, the capital of the Philippines.  Here director Lawrence Fajardo's intimate and deliberate camera documents the nooks and crannys (and crooks and trannys) in Amok.  With patience in the storytelling and the raw talent of an ensemble cast, he delivers, in the tradition of Magnolia and Short...

Opening with a montage of faces, scenes, and sounds of Manila scored by street children rapping about street life, Lawrence Fajardo's Amok immediately captures opposing yet strangely coexisting facets of city life, disconnect and the scarceness of distance.   The film is set in one very specific location in Manila. The Edsa-Pasay Rotonda, situated in the middle of two of Edsa and Taft, two of the busiest streets in Manila, has the unique feature of being several levels of urban madness. The intersecting streets could barely accommodate the volume of traffic, worsened by passenger jeepneys and buses that cruise the street barely an inch from the next vehicle without crashing. The sidewalk is equally busy with pedestrians dodging other pedestrians, sidewalk vendors, their patrons, and...