Philippines’ indie Rein Entertainment asks tough questions in its movies and series, from "Salvageland", which opens in theatres across the Philippines tomorrow (26 Nov), to premium series "Drug War: A Conspiracy of Silence" and "Dose", which has KC Global Media on board as a co-production/distribution partner. Janine Stein speaks to Rein co-founders – Lino S. Cayetano and Shugo Praico – about their why, how, and international growth ambitions.  

 

In the run-up to the 26 November premiere of his new movie, the neo-Western suspense drama Salvageland, Philippines’ director Lino S. Cayetano said much about wealth, freedom, morality and conscience. 

“When rules don’t exist, you’re left with your conscience. When no one is watching, do you still do what’s right?,” Cayetano – previously a politician and the former mayor of Taguig – said in another pre-release conversation, this time in Taipei, at the TCCF event in November. 

Salvageland stars actor and congressman Richard Gomez in his big-screen comeback after a seven-year break as a cynical police-force veteran on the brink of retirement. Elijah Canlas plays his son, an idealistic police officer, who clashes with his father when he attempts to help a woman flee from an abusive gang leader. 

At one of the pre-release events, Gomez talked about the Philippines’ next generation of directors, and said Cayetano “is becoming one of the best young directors of our country and I want to continue working with him.” 

Filmed in the volcanic ash around Mount Pinatubo, Salvageland’s setting is vague: a world where rules don’t exist anymore, where characters are eaten up by a wasteland. Amid the action and gunfights, “Lino smuggled in a father and son melodrama,” says Salvageland writer Shugo Praico, who co-founded Rein Entertainment Productions with Cayetano and Philip King in 2017 and was joined later by producer Charm Guzman. 

The Western genre film, with all the classic gunfights/lawless expectations of a Western, could be an analogy about where the country is heading, the filmmakers say. 

“At its core, we wanted to talk about the conflict between wanting and fighting for change and accepting the status quo,” Cayetano says of the first feature he directed after more than a decade directing television series.  

“When the movie ends, you ask yourself, ‘who’s right? Father or son?... We wanted to show how this world consumes you. No matter how good we are, when we live in an evil world somehow this changes us. We are still a product of our environment. And it becomes even more difficult to fight when you are in this environment,” he said in Taiwan in November.  

Back in Manila, he talked about the old and the new, which he said “always collide for me... and it’s fun to watch the collision”. The film has a father “who wants a quiet life. When he sees something, he will close his eyes or look in another direction. But he has a son who he raised correctly. So his son is fighting him, he doesn’t want it to be like before, he doesn’t want the status quo, he wants change.”

“Stealing is wrong. But what if you steal because your child is sick. What if the person you robbed was a bad, evil person? What if no one is looking?... what if we were all left to our own consciences? Are we still good people? That’s what each character goes through in Salvageland,” he said. 

He was speaking a few weeks after the Busan International Film Festival, where Rein Entertainment Productions was part of the delegation supported by the Philippines Film Development Council.   

Rein’s ramped up presence at industry events are part of the production house’s expansion plans as it heads towards its 10th anniversary in 2027. With a strong domestic partner network already in place, Rein’s next step is a broader regional and international footprint. 

In addition to streaming platforms, the company is reaching out to “people like us who are passionate about telling stories, who are passionate about pursuing the best environment for writers and directors to collaborate in, because I think that was our strength in the Philippines... we want to find the best partners with whom we can tell our stories”. 

Rein’s ideal story is “organic and real. It has to be something that when you look out your window, you see stories of passion and compassion and real stories that cross cultures, and that’s what we’re looking for. We’re in a constant state of story gathering and story development. And I think those are the kinds of partners that we want. We’re passionate about telling that story.” 

 Salvageland, produced by Rein Entertainment with Viva Films, follows TV series Drug War: A Conspiracy of Silence, which Rein presented at the ContentAsia Summit in September, and Dose, which was selected for Taiwan’s TCCF Series Pitch in November. KC Global Media is on board to distribute both series. 

Directed by Praico and starring Ian Veneracion, Jane Oineza, Harvey Bautista and John Arcilla, Drug War follows a sharp-minded priest from a privileged background who works with a conscience-stricken policewoman to investigate the death of his missing protégé.

Currently in script development with a 2027 target delivery, Dose is an eight-episode stylised crime drama about two women – a rising triad queenpin and a relentless international police agent. The two forge an unlikely alliance to battle corrupt cops, ruthless crime lords and violent thugs. 

Talking about straddling film and television, Cayetano highlights the “beauty of cinema... you are in a dark room with 100 people with no phones; you are able to do things that you are not able to do in television. Audiences will watch more intently, composition will have an impact... a hunch in their back or a shadow… you don’t have to show a tear on the face”. 

Rein Entertainment Productions grew out of Philippines’ powerhouse, ABS-CBN, with founders King, Praico and Cayetano wanting to explore stories that didn’t fit the free-TV mandate in an environment with development schedules usually afforded only to premium series. The indie production company was established in 2017, with the blessing and support of ABS-CBN. 

“At Rein, we can incubate a project and an idea for six months, one year, two years, and that’s really the investment,” Cayetano says.

“We felt we were so blessed,” he adds. “For 10 or 15 years, we had a medium and a platform like ABS-CBN... Imagine you shoot something today, or you write something today, and in a few weeks, you know, 20 million people get to watch. But after about 10 years, we felt there were stories that maybe belonged to a different platform... Because when you do free TV, there’s always a limitation”. 

“The idea was to be able to tell stories and make movies and series that were, for lack of better words, in our hearts, stories we wanted to tell,” he adds.  

Their debut was with two original Bagman seasons, in 2017 and 2019. Both streamed on iWantTV and on Netflix in the Philippines. The series told the story of a neighbourhood barber caught up in a web of crime, corruption and political turmoil.  

Rein’s debut was well timed, coinciding with the rise of streaming and the exuberant approach by, among others, iflix and WeTV. GL series BetCin, starring Kylie Padilla and Andrea Torres,  followed for WeTV in 2021. 

A premium version/sequel of Bagman, announced in 2023, was co-produced by ABS-CBN International Production, Dreamscape Entertainment, Rein Entertainment and Nathan Studios. The eight-hour series is about convicted ex-governor, Benjo Malaya, who is forced back into the criminal underworld after he learns that his family is missing. 

“We felt like we were in the right space, on the right path, with stories we couldn’t tell on regular TV,” Cayetano says. That led to a slew of commissions from ABS-CBN, Viva and Regal Films. 

Two years ago, the team was ready to start producing on its own with a group of investors. Today, Rein sources half the financing for a production and then partners with studios for the balance. Features include Elevator (2024), written/directed by Philip King, with Cineko Productions and Viva Films; and eco-horror film, The Caretakers, directed by Praico, produced with horror specialist Regal Entertainment and distributed by EST N8. 

Cayetano constantly references stories with strong women, and highlights the contributions of Rein producer, Charm Guzman. In conversations about Drug War and Dose, he talks about the female leads. In Salvageland, it’s the whistleblower character. “The witness who had the courage to stand up is a woman”, he said. “So that was the beautiful part of the story and that’s what the son protected”.