Photographed by Inah Maravilla. Courtesy of Mariana and Gabriela Serrano
A story of past wounds, family drama, and identity, Gabriela and Mariana Serrano dive into grief, heartbreak, and loss.
When directors Gabriela and Mariana Serrano were developing their film Surface Tension, one quote by Gaston Bachelard inspired them: “A being dedicated to water is a being in flux.” That is, a person imaginatively identified with the element of water accepts a life of constant, flowing change and impermanence. And as life flows, we navigate these universal emotions: grief, heartbreak, and loss.
Bulet, played by Mariana, wades through these feelings in the film. A young competitive swimmer, the character comes to her hometown in Laguna for a cousin’s wedding. As she returns, she is faced with past wounds, family drama, questions about home and identity, and finds herself increasingly overwhelmed as the day goes on.
“It made sense to make our protagonist a swimmer,” Gabriela says. “Something about the devotion to a physical discipline that requires you to hold your breath and keep propelling yourself forward felt like a strong allegory for moving through the pain of loss.”
Surface Tension fixates on the dissociative nature of heartbreak. As Bulet goes through the day, she seems to float in and out of two separate worlds. Mariana shares that they wanted to explore “how strongly that pain can pull you out of the mundane physical location or stable mental state into distant, extremely potent memories and emotions.” “This portal-like, whiplash-inducing quality of grief is something we found akin to the polarity of being above and under water: instantly flipping between two completely different states,” she says.
She describes that the “in-betweenness of never fully being comfortable and being at ease” causes tension as Bulet goes through one of the most emotionally taxing days of her life. A tension that they held throughout the film, all leading to a great exhale that captures the struggle of keeping feelings pent up inside.
Visually, this translated into their choice of camera as well. Together with their cinematographer Aaron Marasigan, underwater director of photography, Tey Clamor, and creative producer, Celeste Lapida, they built a sense of clarity from the beginning of the film to the end. For the first two-thirds of the film, they used HD Sony Handycam camcorders and GoPro, then increased the quality and resolution, ending with a 4k Arri Alexa Mini and Sony FX30. As the film gains clarity, the “exhale” is made visually palpable with this direction.
Although fictional, the story has personal roots for the sisters. The pair shares that a year ago, they went through individual heartbreaks: the dissolution of a longtime romantic attachment, and having to put their family’s lakeside land in Laguna on the market after a typhoon destroyed their childhood home. While doing laps in their neighborhood’s public swimming pool, they both realized that their heartaches mirrored each other, as if the separate stories we were telling each other were the exact same story.
“We wanted to probe this phenomenon, and also help each other emerge through our griefs, by facing them together through water and the camera,” they say.
Doing the film meant having to revisit the past. The sisters reopened old chat messages, looking at bittersweet memories through childhood photographs, and physically immersing themselves in their personal sites of trauma. Gabriela shares that during a technical reconnaissance on location, a group of buyers seeking to buy their land showed up at the same time to look at the property.
“We were speechless and paralyzed at that moment. It was cosmically painful,” Gabriela says. Mariana adds, “But it felt like a sign from the universe to keep making the film, and to do it right away. As if there was an urgency to capture this pain and release it.”
The film is the sisters’ fourth attempt at submitting their concepts to the QCShorts Grant. It also marks Mariana’s directorial debut, as she had previously only played the leads in her sister’s short films. “Getting in this time felt like a culmination of all those rejections. Like we finally cracked the recipe, but more importantly, found our true voice along the way,” Mariana says. Although it’s their most personal story, Gabriela shares that it’s the script that they spent the least amount of time on. “We had a pretty nonchalant, ‘bahala na’ attitude in applying this time,” she says. “Looking back, that initial application felt like we put our rawest selves on the pages,” Mariana adds.
This year, aside from securing the grant, Gabriela and Mariana also celebrated another milestone: being awarded Best Short Film in the QCShorts Lokal section. “Crescondoing into a realm of beautiful magical realism, it blends meticulous sound design, confident direction, and technical prowess of underwater cinematography to portray a deeply personal quest to break free and ultimately breathe again,” QCinema writes in an Instagram post.
As Surface Tension emerges from QCinema, the sisters hope that the film prompts audiences to ask these questions: Why are we caught in a loop? Why do we repress our pain? What do we need to break in order to free ourselves and breathe? And as we ask these questions, they also remind us that there is always a place where we can “exhale.” “That place is home, and home is inside you. You can go there anytime you wish,” Gabriela says.
