KEN SIO attends the screening of Some Nights I Feel Like Walking directed by Peterson Vargas as part of this year’s Queer East Festival.
The ability to see Filipino cinema on a screen has often been restricted to select streaming services and teleserye boxes. Rarely do I get the chance to hear Tagalog beyond the confines of my family group chat. In Western media, Filipino characters are often relegated to one-note comedic roles or neglected entirely, denied opportunities to express emotional depth, let alone queerness.
Queer East is challenging the lack of shared stories among the Asian diaspora. Across four weeks, the festival showcases over 100 features, shorts, moving images, and documentaries, mapping lived experiences and untold stories from across the East and Southeast Asian landscape. Some Nights I Feel Like Walking (2024) by Peterson Vargas, screened at the Barbican Centre, is one of the many rich, chaotic, and vital LGBTQ+ stories featured this year.
The film unfolds in the neon-drenched nightscape of Manila, zooming in on the precarious, gritty lives of queer street youth. With a stylised gaze, Vargas offers an intimate look into the lives of sex workers hustling in urinals, porn cinemas, and night markets. The opening scene closely follows Uno (Jomari Angeles), a young sex worker, approaching a coach terminal restroom to cruise. There, he meets Zion (Miguel Odron), a recent and reserved runaway hiding in a cubicle. The scene captures a moment of trust between the two strangers. Uno belongs to a group of young, seasoned queer hustlers, forming a found family bound by wit, abandonment, and the need to survive. Forming the emotional centre of the film, their humorous and fiery personalities are delivered with excellent performances.
It is a post-pandemic Philippines, and the group faces increasing difficulty finding stable income. After being approached in a gay porn cinema, Zion and Uno find themselves working the same job, receiving oral sex from their client and sharing their payment. In their second encounter, the pair develops a slow-burning and unmistakable chemistry—held hands, prolonged eye contact, and heavy breaths as their faces draw closer. At first, Uno is surprised to see Zion as a new face working the streets. Their dynamic balances the transactional sex of their work with a counterpoint of longing and intimacy. The film develops their chance encounter into a young romance, their flirting an escape from their harsh realities.
Shortly after, their budding relationship is shaken by the sudden death of Ge (Gold Aceron), a beloved member of their circle, drugged and left to die by a client. Urban character drama quickly turns to queer road movie as the group sets off to fulfil Ge’s dying wish, carrying his lifeless body in a black duffel bag to a rural Filipino province. As rage and grief overtake them, Vargas delivers a pointed critique of the Duterte-era war on drugs, capturing the boys’ fearful reluctance to seek medical help, knowing they would be vilified for drug use.
The road trip becomes a vehicle for deeper themes of kinship, cultural tradition, and regret. Zion must prove himself loyal to the group, all the while concealing a more privileged background that contrasts starkly with their shared experiences of precarity. His affluence and timid personality create a central tension with the fiery Bay (Argel Saycon), a dynamic that evolves throughout the journey. The plot and characters’ outlook may appear bleak, yet the film maintains an optimism and joy palpable throughout. Its characters are given moments to laugh, grieve, and fight, making them a dynamic and compelling ensemble.
In attempting to move beyond realism, Vargas employs techniques that at times feel clumsy and indulgent. The overuse of smoke machines, forced dream sequences, clichéd backdrops, and jarring tonal shifts occasionally undermines the film’s emotional core. While we feel pulled by a humanistic portrayal of queer struggles, these less grounded approaches leave areas of the plot and script feeling underdeveloped. Often, the nuances of Tagalog in conversation are lost in their English translation, flattening the humour and emotional resonance of the captioned dialogue. Still, I am glad to have a chance to see a Filipino film take artistic risks on a big screen.
Despite its flaws, Some Nights I Feel Like Walking is ambitious in scope and form. One of its most striking elements is its use of long, one-shot takes that follow the characters through tight city alleyways, jeepneys, and rural town paths. The camera lingers behind as the characters make quick, impromptu decisions about their journey. Emotionally, the film resists dwelling on moments of grief and the group’s hardships. Instead, it creates rapid tonal shifts within minutes, from boyish humour to surges of urgency and reflection. The final scene sees the group arrive at Ge’s town during a local festival, casting the duffel bags into a ceremonial fire among local townspeople burning their belongings as offerings for blessing. The shot lingers on their silhouettes, the group now bonded by their journey, framed against a backdrop of flames.
Vargas crafts a film that is at once messy, original, and defiant, mirroring the very lives it seeks to portray. Queerness is not made palatable or overly optimistic, grounding itself in moments of the mundane, grief, and pleasure. As queer narratives come politically under threat—and as independent Asian cinema continues to struggle for Western distribution—festivals like Queer East emerge as critical platforms of preservation and resistance, to share stories otherwise unheard.
The Queer East Festival runs from 23 April to 18 May, 2025. Featured image courtesy of Petersen Vargas on Cargo Collective.