Q&A with actress Anne Curtis

After decades of films that followed formula, a handful of (mostly) female filmmakers are reinventing the staple genre of Philippines cinema: the romance. Irene Villamor is at the vanguard, with vibrant dialogue, honest situations…and sex. Here, Dingdong Dantes plays a cutthroat stockbroker who can’t sleep at night. He befriends Anne Curtis’s sassy cafe waitress and offers to pay her $20 an hour to talk him through his insomnia. But she becomes the one in control in this anti-romance that has as much to say about class war as the battle of the sexes. New York Premiere