Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively?

The Philippines—in all its contradictions, its beauty, its spectacle, its heartache. I’ve made many films about where I was born, but I’ve always wanted to make a film about exuberance, even if it does not have a happy ending in conventional terms. This film leans into the spectacle of elections, the music, and the dancing. Nowhere else are elections held in this manner where every candidate has their own color, multiple songs written for them, and murals painted that dot the landscape of this 7,100-island archipelago. It’s radical and joyful. Joy as a form of resistance, as the poem goes.