Last March was International Women’s Month—a time when most of the world recognizes women’s contributions to society. For the world of queer girls, though? It’s the time to celebrate women-loving women in the LGBTQIA+ community.

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Bridging those two sides is Samantha Lee, Cinemalaya-winning director of hit Filipino women loving women (WLW) films Rookie (2023), Baka Bukas (2016), and Billie & Emma (2018). To cap off March’s festivities, Direk Sam shares how she navigates life off-camera as a sapphic filmmaker long before her works found their place on the screens of young queer Filipinos today. No matter what gender, audiences can pick up a thing or two from Direk Sam and her works that reflect the nuanced art of representing delicate lived experiences through stories that transcend identity—speaking not just to women who love women, but to anyone who has ever loved, fought, and cared deeply for another.

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Behind the Scenes: When in the WLW Film Industry…

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Sapphic, Girls’ Love (GL), and WLW refer to a genre of stories that revolve around the attraction between queer women. However you prefer to call them, queer women-centered narratives are creating names for themselves as more literary works shift to digital forms—a queering of the media landscape that has been decades in the making. Lesbian feminism and calls for queer representation in the media peaked in the late 20th century. When the 21st century came around, LGBTQIA+ communities popped up in digital spaces like Tumblr, at the same time that fanmade female-on-female stories did on fanfiction websites like Archive of Our Own. Empowered by this queer digital media boom, the saplings of sapphic cinema are now finding their ground on Generation Z’s devices.

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When searching for sapphic movies online, a long list of titles appears, but the most popular ones often come from countries outside the Philippines. South Korea has The Handmaiden, the United States has But I’m A Cheerleader, France has The Portrait of a Lady on Fire—the list goes on without a Filipino film in sight. When asked how she thinks the Philippines can push for more locally made WLW movies, Direk Sam prompted a thought-provoking question: How does our behavior as audiences impact what kind of films get made?

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This question pushes us into a deep dive down a valid line of thinking: Before we call for more actions based on what we do not have, we must look into our reactions to what we already do have. Colonial mentality may be at the root, tracing back to Filipinos’ deeply ingrained preference for Western products over our country’s own. Even then, those who get past colonial mentality may not be able to afford watching local films. Consequently, Direk Sam acknowledges that not all Filipinos can subscribe to Rookie’s pay-to-watch platform on Prime Video. Locals then turn to international GL movies, which are more widespread and accessible than the few existing Filipino WLW films.

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This paywall is the biggest hindrance for Filipinos who do give local sapphic movies a chance—the biggest legal hindrance, at least. 

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Discord streaming parties and pirated copies do more harm than you might expect. Of course, kilig screams, keyboard-smash gushing, and fan behavior are appreciated alongside open shows of support. Behind the closed doors of film pitch meetings, however, public support is proven by view counts on the official platforms. Piracy steals insights that could have been the turning point for your favorite director to persuade producers to fund their next project. Thus, when you think you are supporting the local WLW movie industry by spreading pirated links on X out of fangirl excitement, it may actually be counterproductive. 

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“If people want to see more of these things being made, then they need to be able to support [them] in a very tangible manner, instead of actually doing things that hinder more of those things [from getting] made,” Direk Sam stresses.

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Aside from piracy concerns, gender-related issues pose problems for the sapphic film industry. Unfortunately, even a queer woman who creates art based on her own experiences is not exempt from the criticism that women generally face more compared to men. “Why is our society so patriarchal that even sapphic women who consume sapphic media turn a blind eye when a man does this problematic [GL trope]?” Direk Sam questions. A boss-employee GL can exhibit an inappropriate abuse of power, but audiences brush it off and still catapult the show to stardom, never mind that a man wrote the dynamic. When a sapphic woman makes so much as a minuscule mistake, however, people suddenly hound and criticize every detail. 

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When it comes to stories told from a point of view different from the creator’s own, scrutiny should be applied with equity. Ideally, this implies more pressure on cisgender male creators who write sapphic characters. Realistically, this is not the case in the GL media industry, where careful representation of women can be easily skewed into careless misrepresentation by men. Just like that, gender-based unfairness can weigh down the sapphic community.  This sets them back to square one in the same old political narrative of men versus women and the LGBTQIA+ community—a “tale as old as time” in its purest form.

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Off-Camera: The Art of Representation

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While misrepresentation is a part of politics, representation is an art. With that, art is not just caricaturing characters and tropes and calling it a day; rather, art is an intimate process of deeply connecting with the picture you are trying to paint.

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How Direk Sam handled the sexual assault storyline in Rookie is a snapshot into the technique of representation. Before finalizing the film, Direk Sam volunteered at a women’s helpline to help naturally speak to the authenticity of others’ experiences. “It manifests in the nuances of creation,” Direk Sam expressed. In Rookie’s case, volunteering led to a nuanced final cut. Intimacy made the story more authentic as it was more vulnerable—something that just a superficial storyboard without in-depth immersion may otherwise get wrong. Nothing about that process of trying to understand others’ experiences better and coming to genuine realizations that drive one to debunk misconceptions is scripted, even in filmmaking.

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“As a queer female director, I try to handle these lived experiences that other people have with as much care and respect as possible,” Direk Sam shares. “And the only way that I’m able to do that is to actually speak or listen to the people.”

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Nonetheless, well-meaning exposures of personal experiences are not automatically perfect. For instance, Direk Sam’s first and most personal film Baka Bukas ironically received the most backlash in her filmography. Netizens jabbed at how the film did not cast actual queer women for the main couple and presented only middle-class characters.

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When a creator is among the first to plant seeds on such a barren field, what they do is based on what they know. Gracefully, Direk Sam embraced and learned from the criticism—and, in fact, even called for more. “That’s why it’s so important that hopefully, in an ideal world, chances be given to a lot of queer filmmakers specifically, because there [are] so many stories that need to be told from different perspectives,” Direk Sam states. The field of Filipino WLW media wants as many seeds as it can get, and before it flourishes, it needs to welcome variation. Before the field grows, it needs constructive criticism to paint a picture that is representative of all.

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Under the Spotlight: Queer Identity Under Conservative Catholicism

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As much as the storyteller brings others’ stories to life, their life also brings themselves into their stories. Direk Sam is a queer female artist who studied in a Catholic school for 18 years before attending the University of the Philippines, a non-sectarian institution. Though Rookie and Billie & Emma are set in a Catholic school, Direk Sam confesses that she has not yet fully unpacked how a conservative Catholic school impacted her own identity as a queer person, and it is as real as a creator of fiction can get. Hours of a positive film do not instantly erase years of society trying to drill negativity into an individual’s head. The bright minds behind light fiction are no exception.

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Fortunately, Direk Sam shares hope in the common theme shared by the endings of both Rookie and Billie & Emma: “Just showing up every day in a system that’s trying to erase who you are is an act of resistance in itself.” It can be as wholesome as Billie serenading Emma in front of the town, or as powerful as Ace and Jana sharing a kiss in front of their team. Simple exposure can be serious defiance, especially when it comes to minorities like queers who have been forced into hiding for the longest time.

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“Despite all these things that they’re trying to correct or scare from you, you’re still winning because you get to live your life and discover who you are authentically,” emphasized Direk Sam. It may seem counterintuitive to end on a positive note, given the challenges to WLW representation. The country is far from the finish line. If we want to catch up to other countries’ sapphic exposure, systemic change should drive us forward—not just one film, not just one director, not just one societal actor.

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Like the endings of Direk Sam’s films, the future always has an open ending. Nevertheless, also like Direk Sam’s endings, the future of women-loving women leans toward the bright side. Fictional stories are not useless fantasies; they are hopeful possibilities. If only audiences keep this in mind, a common ground becomes clear for both queers and non-queers: For people who simply love other people, we only hope artful literary representation continues to cultivate the field of acceptance and growth.

Ashe Villena is a BS Psychology sophomore at Ateneo de Manila University. Forever a humanities and social sciences girl at heart, she channels her time off the academic (and gala) grind through her affinity with writing — from literature to pop culture and everything in between.

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