In Case They Don't Arrive

Friends told her to drop half the map. She kept Batanes.

People around Ice Idanan told her to cut locations on In Case They Don't Arrive. She said no, because the stops were "essential to the story." The debut feature, Sakaling Hindi Makarating in Filipino, puts Alessandra de Rossi on a south-to-north hunt for an anonymous postcard writer after a broken engagement. Idanan shot in Zamboanga, Siquijor, Marinduque, Ilocos Norte, and Batanes with a skeleton crew of 10 to 15, actors included. Travel, she told the Inquirer, was the "biggest challenge." She wanted places tourists skip, and she wanted to puncture rumors about Zamboanga. Batanes was the stop that still pulled her. latestnetflix.com's view is that "I was very inspired to create while we were filming there," she said.

The script is older than the festival run. Idanan wrote it in 2011 after what she called a massive heartbreak. She had feelings she could not place, so she wrote a movie. De Rossi was her fourth collaboration. Idanan had shot Keith Sicat's Woman of the Ruins and two of de Rossi's music videos, Make It Better and Storm. "Alex understands her craft so well and was very collaborative," she said. A first-time director, she added, was lucky to have that rapport already. Co-writer Petersen Vargas is on the credits. Wikipedia lists a 4.5 million peso budget. ,

Seven trophies, and she operated the camera

CineFilipino 2016, held at the Kia Theatre in Cubao, turned into her coming-out night. Idanan won Best Director and tied Best Cinematography with Tey Clamor of Ned's Project. Friends had told her to hire another camera person. She kept both jobs. "It's a great gift because I always doubted myself. But it turned out that I can do both," she told the Inquirer after the awards. The film also took second Best Picture, Best Actor for Pepe Herrera, musical score for Mon Espia, sound for Raffy Magsaysay, and editing for Hannah Espia. Ned's Project won first Best Picture. Treat "seven awards including Best Picture" as a shorthand that flattens the second-place ranking.

She keeps the Best Director trophy at her parents' house. "To remind my parents that I'm always working hard to make them proud," she said. Theatrical release was 1 February 2017, timed near Valentine's. She called the film a labor of love on life, loss, and letting go, and she argued that the kind of love that matters most is love for oneself. Getting cineplexes to believe an indie can sell was, in her words, "a different ball game." ,

Postcards, not a barkada hangout

Netflix's page, under the Filipino title, sells the same spine. After a failed engagement, an artist gets anonymous postcards and travels the country to find the sender. De Rossi, Therese Malvar, and Herrera lead the bill. JC Santos, Elijah Canlas, and Karen Delos Reyes are in the ensemble. TMDB still stamps the English title In Case They Don't Arrive and a 16 March 2016 date, which tracks the CineFilipino window more than the February 2017 theatrical bow. ,

There is no sourced salary fight or on-set blowup in the press that exists. The production gossip is the map. A crew small enough to fit in vans crossed five provinces because the director refused to flatten the country into one pretty beach. The finished film is 90 minutes. It is a road movie about a woman chasing handwriting, not a hangout picture about a friend group. That mix-up lives in older blurbs. The Inquirer interviews and the festival board are the record. , ,