Outlining the rise of Philippine slums alongside the historical development of Philippine urban cinema, Slum Imaginaries and Spatial Justice in Philippine Cinema makes a novel contribution to the cinema-city nexus through its interdisciplinary framework of film studies and human geography. It formulates the theory of the 'slum chronotope' as a theoretical tool to analyse narrative and genre formation in films that dialogue with Manila's slum imaginaries, and makes the case for Philippine urban cinema and Philippine urban history as a significant vantage point from which to understand imaginaries of spatial justice.
With case studies that take off from The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (2005) to Respeto (2017), this book is a powerful contribution to transnational cinema studies.