endIndex: Antoinette Jadaone s Fan Girl, starring Paulo Avelino and Charlie Dizon, won the Best Picture in this year s Metro Manila Film Festival. Screencap from BLACK SHEEP/YOUTUBE
Dagupan (CNN Philippines Life) With Filipino stories dominating the screens every Christmas season, the Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) is historically home to some of mainstream Filipino cinema’s best and worst.
This year, the MMFF expands its film selection to ten films instead of the usual eight, and offers even Filipinos outside of the country a chance to celebrate with the community, via online streaming as the country is still in quarantine.
endIndex: These are the 20 K-pop songs that brought us many highs in a year that called for more emotional ammunition than ever. Screenshot from BIG HIT LABELS/YOUTUBE
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines Life) For the bigger K-pop labels, it seems like 2020 was business as usual, despite the specter of the pandemic undercutting their releases. It felt like there’s no stopping an industrial juggernaut. Virtual audiences were summoned, smashes were released, and legends broke new ground.
But for many K-pop fans, music was the balm to an insane year. While this can be true for any year, that a song can be a salve to any distress, the level of insanity that 2020 brought about made us cling to pop music even more. For every “Dynamite,” there’s “Life Goes On” that assures us that it’s always darkest before dawn. For every “How You Like That,” there’s “Lovesick Girls” that provides us an anthem for when we stand up again.