Mahal

Mahal is a 3-minute experimental animation created for my Media Arts course, “Animated Assemblages”. Structured as a non-linear video collage, the piece explores how love, dating, and relationships have been portrayed in Filipino screen culture, from 1950s love team cinema to karaoke ballads, early 2010s hugot memes, and internet ephemera.

Set across shifting digital and analog spaces — a videoke room, a Facebook page, a computer desktop in a computer cafe — Mahal brings together familiar icons like Jollibee and Minions to evoke both sincerity and satire. It’s a layered love letter to the absurd, nostalgic, and emotionally charged media that has shaped how many of us witnessed love on screen.