PETERSEN VARGAS

Award-winning Filmmaker

There is a vivid sense of desaturated tenderness and distinct nostalgia to the films of Petersen Vargas. As if unlocking a long kept memory in our minds, his diffused narratives are anchored on a truth that calls to mind that moment in our lives where temperament and trepidation coalesced into a fully realized identity.

A bonafide filmmaker, Petersen Vargas is a little squeamish with the mention of his influence, given his young age. But for him, the lofty ideal is the power to change people, either to change their perspective or how they think. “Ever since I was a film student I think I was already confident in what kind of stories I wanted to tell. And [they’re] stories that are really personal to me,” he says. “So I make Kapampangan films and I make films about gay people and lives. Having experienced being an audience and seeing the kind of content Philippine cinema has been giving, or the content on mainstream television, I wasn’t able to find something I could connect with. So when I was given the opportunity to tell stories, I wanted to tell stories that were really going to be about real experiences, real people.”

With notable and distinguished films such as Lisyun sa Qng Geografiya (Geography

Lessons) and 2 Cool 2 Be 4Gotten, he has stuck to his strengths, revealing his truth and projecting it on a screen for everyone to relate and quietly bare their souls to.

Moving forward into a world of many possibilities, the young filmmaker simply intends to further the narrative he has quietly tucked under his arm. “I want to keep telling stories that matter to me, because sino pa ba? Who would tell these stories for us and the generations to come?” Petersen Vargas throws this question to a generation as a whole but it seems certain at this point that these stories will at one point be appended by his name, a storyteller of the presumably forgotten but forever immortalized in celluloid. —ARDC