Dir: Morgan Knibbe | Social Thriller 129’ 2025
A splashy cinematic thriller showcasing sordid sexual awakening for two lost souls in the squalid world of mass prostitution and corruption in the Philippines
The Garden of Earthly Delights, winner of this year’s top award at the 43rd Turin Film Festival echoes Slumdog Millionaire with its fast-moving vibrant snapshot of a shabby city. This time the tone is more sober and the place is Manila where the dizzying action follows a timid Dutch tourist who arrives to meet up with a woman he thinks is his girlfriend.
The two of them met on the internet and his quest to find ‘Sunny’ leads him through the crowded and tortuous streets of the capital highlighting the growing problem of crime and prostitution. His path will eventually cross with Ginto, 8, a street urchin who lives with his sister earning her living as a sex worker for a venal pimp.
In Manila every kind of sexual predilection is catered for, and the nauseating images of self-gratification are graphic and disturbing. Young girls, women and lady boys ply their wares for the best price, and Ginto’s sister makes good money.
Hardened by a family tragedy that unfairly lands him in prison, Ginto decides to turn his hand to working tricks in the lucrative sex trade, meanwhile the Dutch tourist loses his way, increasingly intoxicated by the louche lifestyle of aimless westerners drunk on the ease of obtaining sexual gratification of whatever orientation they desire, but devoid of emotional connection.
With spectacular camerawork on the wide screen and in intimate closeup, Dutch filmmaker Morgan Knibbe makes use of psychedelic colours and magic realism in a story that drifts around in surrealist sequences and swirling images that melt into exotic flowers with vibrant bursts of colour that nevertheless deliver a potent message of moral decline and social decadence. This is a film you’ll wish you hadn’t seen due to its sickening subject matter. @MeredithTaylor
WINNER | TORINO FILM FESTIVAL 2025