Exclusive: Petersen Vargas on Some Nights I Feel Like Walking, Queer Desire, and Brotherhood in Manila

We spoke with director Petersen Vargas about his new film Some Nights I Feel Like Walking, a queer Filipino story of cruising, desire, and youth on the streets of Manila.

When Petersen Vargas began writing Some Nights I Feel Like Walking in 2017, he was thinking about two things at once: the rising violence of the Duterte regime and the ways Manila itself had shaped his queer identity. “There’s not one way to answer that question because it was just really a lot of things but maybe the first thing I could share is that this film started all the way back in 2017 and right around that time it was a year into the Duterte regime, but actually I was just really interested in making a film about where I was as a queer boy who moved from the province to Manila,” Vargas recalls. 

The result is a night-long odyssey through Manila’s underbelly, where a band of hustlers carry the body of a fallen friend across the city, determined to honor his final wish of being taken home. For Vargas, it was impossible to tell this story without tying it to the streets that defined him. “It really started with how I wanted to make a film about how the Manila streets birthed my gay identity first and foremost. Why do I say that? It’s because I discovered cruising when I moved to the city and because of cruising I was able to actually first discover and then eventually understand my own desires as a queer gay guy.” 

Vargas’ debut, 2 Cool 2 Be 4gotten, was also a queer coming-of-age story, but this new work demanded something more ambitious and more difficult. “The most challenging part was how to get this funded, essentially. The six-seven-year journey of the film involved partners both locally and internationally and how we collaborated with them not just within the technical standpoint of the film but also creatively. That’s why it took a while, but I’m really glad that… finally, like eight years after we’re able to show in cinemas, in Philippine cinemas,” he says.

Though the initial plan was to street-cast real hustlers, the pandemic forced a different approach: long interviews over Zoom with more than 400 young people. Out of that emerged Jomari Angeles, Argel Saycon, Tommy Alejandrino, Gold Azeron, and Miguel Odron, a singer and Idol Philippines finalist, making his screen debut as Zion. Vargas was drawn not to Odron’s résumé but to his amorous nature. “What endeared me to him was that he was openly queer and during the interview he was talking about how he had this restlessness that made him, hang out alone in random bars around the city, I feel like he must have lived through like what my character must have lived through,” Vargas shares. 

 For Vargas, the film is part of a lineage. He points to the so-called “macho dancer films” of the 1970s and 1980s, made by figures like Lino Brocka and written by Ricky Lee with Mel Chionglo, stories of cis male characters who turned to macho dancing and prostitution to survive the city. He also cites the DIY queer cinema of the 2000s, when Crisaldo Pablo made what he called “home videos” about his own personal queer experiences, liberated by the affordability of digital filmmaking.

“My hope is with Some Nights I Feel Like Walking, I wanted to continue that tradition of making a film about Manila, but this is a Manila of the outsiders, a Manila that is not essentially about the characters that you see in your daily commutes. These are characters that are hiding in clandestine corners and the seedy underbelly of Manila and how it could reflect the conditions of the city and the conditions of Manila I know.” The soundscape, created with longtime collaborator Alyana Cabral, better known as Teenage Granny, layers original compositions with the real noise of Manila: jeepneys, radios, and street bustle.

Costumes, designed by Whammy Alcazaren, similarly ground the characters in the reality of the city with misspelled brand shirts and lived-in sportswear. “We just really wanted these characters to feel like real people,” Vargas says. In keeping with its spirit, the Philippine premiere took place at Isetann Recto, a shopping mall long associated with underground cinema and queer cruising. Guests were welcomed with an ukay-ukay stall, a street ice cream cart, massage chairs, free sexual health services, and live performances by macho dancers, turning the theater into a living extension of Manila’s streets.

Ultimately, the film is about chosen brotherhood and the weight of one life. “The takeaway was always different, but when you really think about it and if you’ve already had the experience of losing someone, even just one person you cared about it’s painful and it’s something that you carry for the rest of your life. The characters that we made aren’t exactly bound by blood, but they were the ones who were there for each other,” Vargas reflects. And so his Manila; gritty, dangerous, and alive with fleeting connections, becomes a place where queer desire and solidarity are not just survival strategies, but ways of making the city one’s own.