Our Philosophy

The MARILOU DIAZ-ABAYA FILM INSTITUTE AND ARTS CENTER is an educational facility dedicated to the creative formation and technical training of film students aspiring for a viable career in the motion picture industries.

MDAFI advocates longevity in filmmaking by obtaining both a solid film education AND a wealth of experiences in multi-media. It enjoins aspiring filmmakers to learn the “mother tongue” of the 35mm feature film narrative to facilitate success in the other genres of advertising, documentaries, music videos, corporate videos, television productions, and educational videos. 

Its pedagogical method, adapted and designed by Director Diaz-Abaya from her own educational and professional experiences, integrates the best teaching techniques from Asia, Europe and the Americas.  In a spirit which harmonizes individual creative freedom and team collaboration, the Institute offers inter-disciplinary studies in the arts, sciences and business to mold well-rounded, socially responsible filmmakers.  

Moreover, the Institute chooses to stress an ASIAN, rather than a Hollywood, perspective.  Director Diaz-Abaya explains, “Asia is home to vast treasures of culture and the arts.  Although I am an avid student of both Eastern and Western cultures, I choose to proceed from my specific Asian origin, and from here, to the world.  There is a particularly Asian way of making and viewing films, a more personal and familial approach.  Premium is given to the affective, rather than the intellectual appreciation of human stories.  The language of Asian motion pictures is the language of more than half of the human race.  It is a very important language.”

Director Diaz-Abaya believes that the motion picture language is better taught and learned in the context of the humanities, and of culture and the arts.  Thus, additional lessons in art history and sociology are integrated into the core curriculum of film studies.

MDAFI offers a solid core curriculum, with a faculty of widely experienced instructors, and campuses which feel more like craftsmen’s homes, rather than impersonal classrooms.  Academic instruction and professional field training are given equal importance.  Students are provided precious opportunities to observe their mentors at work on feature films, advertising films, documentaries and MTVs.  Frequently moving back and forth between the classroom and the living sets for principal photography and post production dictate the rhythm of a MDAFI student’s life.  In these borderless classrooms, students and mentors develop lifetime career partnerships.

Filmmakers are privileged to seek and express the human condition in a globalized, volatile world where Information Technology is a double-edged sword, simultaneously unifying and fragmenting our identity as a race.  When human beings are presented with innumerable, often confusing, even self-destructive options to life  “styles“  in the twenty- first century,  the visual storyteller is challenged to evoke significant human experiences which could validate the worthiness of life itself. 

In no other medium than cinema are the sights and sounds of our humanity more sharply poignant and unforgettable.  Indeed, it has precious social benefits.  It is worth studying as seriously as one studies to become a physician, a priest, a lawyer or an engineer.  

For thousands of years, storytellers, particularly Asian storytellers, performed the social role of “keepers of dreams”.  Their craft was handed down orally, with painstaking discipline and commitment.  Eventually, they drew it on cave walls, wrote it down in scrolls, then they recorded it books, in celluloid, magnetic tapes, and then, much later, tossed it out in cyberspace for anyone and everyone to inherit.   Let the new storytellers today do no less than their forebears.  Let motion picture storytellers share their legacy today.

Study film, join a movement!

Our faculty corps includes multi-awarded, practicing professionals from the various fields of 16mm and 35mm feature films, advertising films, tv entertainment, documentary/advocacy and short films, all of whom share a collective passion for studying and teaching the arts and crafts of cinema, and passing on their wealth of experiences to the incoming generations of visual storytellers working in both video and film technologies. 

Nestled in the quiet Beverly Hills Village of Antipolo (site), Metro Manila, the Institute provides an ideal,  conducive environment where students learn filmmaking in the context of the humanities, of society, culture and the arts.