MANILA -- With proper funding and all, filmmaker-professor Sari Dalena said she would do a Part II of “Dahlin’ Nick,” a docu-drama on the life and works of National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin.

Co-written with her husband Keith Sicat and her childhood friend, poet-fictionist Kris Lacaba, “Dahlin’ Nick” was originally shown as part of the competition category in the 2015 Cinema One Originals. For one week in August this year, it was made available on C1 Originals You Tube Channel.

For those who missed it, the good news now is that it will be streamed again as part of this year’s Pista ng Pelikulang Pilipino (PPP), which started on October 31 and runs until December 13. Short films have been made available for free on the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP) channel website since October 31, while the full-length features like the three-hour docu “Dahlin’ Nick” will start streaming on November 20 as part of the more than 170 films in the 4th PPP.

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“Kris Lacaba and I have been dreaming of doing a film on his [Joaquin’s] children’s stories. Also another idea would be to focus on ‘A Question of Heroes’ and the Quijano de Manila reportage, biographies, with historians as interviewees,” Dalena told ABS-CBN News recently in an online informal interview.

When “Dahlin’ Nick” ended its seven-day streaming on Cinema One Originals’ You Tube channel, it gathered 27,719 views before it became inaccessible again. It was up for one week, from midnight August 20 to midnight of August 27.

Dalena, as well as the cast members, were just but happy for the short though limited run. Being a docu-drama and running for three hours, “Dahling Nick” had its niche audience and followers. Some literature professors were also ckeen enough to assign their students and write reaction papers.

The planned sequel

“Dahlin’ Nick” was a brave, necessary gamble for Dalena. Cinema One Originals gave Dalena the freedom to explore Joaquin, an elusive subject who valued his privacy to the fullest and shunned praises.

Dalena said she would have wanted to dramatize the short stories “Summer Solstice” and “Guardia de Honor,” as well as the poem, “Six O’ Clock” and two from the-now out of print collection, “Pop Stories for Groovy Kids” but it won’t fit the three-hour long docu drama.

Charo Joaquin Villegas, the administrator of the Joaquin Estate, gave the go-signal to Dalena to include the two stories. “It also didn’t make the budget cut,” Dalena said.

“Pop Stories” was published in 1979 by Mr. and Mrs. Publishing Company, the same firm behind the eponymously titled lifestyle news weekly magazine owned by the late Eugenia Apostol. The books were grouped into two, The Red Series and The Green Series.

Sari intended to include “Lilit Bulilit and the Babe in the Womb” from the “Pop Stories” Green Series and “The Amazing History of Elang Uling” from the Red Series.

“Pop Stories” have been out of print for years and there’s even an online petition to re-publish the series.

All these would be included in the sequel and some more.

With the limitations set by the pandemic, Dalena said she might resort to animation. Still, she aspires to film everything, the much-missed dramatization with real actors.

“Animation takes longer to execute and also more expensive,” she said. She knew that having emergency funds for extra costs would ease a lot of burdens.

In “Dahlin’ Nick,” for instance, she had to shoulder the expenses in paying the copyright for the Cole Porter song, “You’re The Top,” which Joaquin loved to sing with improvised lyrics.

“It was an issue even before production started. I was aware of the tedious process of securing rights to a classic song,” Dalena said.

She had to pay Warner Music, in her words, “a fortune,” otherwise there won’t be “You’re The Top.”

The other materials were acquired through the kindness of Joaquin’s friends.

The docu has a drinking session audio recorded by Danny Dalena. Joaquin is heard calling someone “Dahlin, you’re the writer of the year. I thought Quijano de Manila was un-beat-able! You wanna bathe in beer?”

Dalena recalled Joaquin was drinking with her dad, writer Recah Trinidad and wife Fe. This delightful rare tape recording she used for the opening credits.

In another audio recording, Joaquin is heard berating a young man for not knowing how to speak Spanish despite growing up in a household where the language is spoken by the elders.

“You can’t speak Spanish? What a shame, you stinky boy!” Joaquin teased the boy.

It turned out, the young man was F. Sionil Jose’s son, the teenaged Eugene Jose, and a fellow Lasallian student and namesake, Eugene Lacson.

The boys are also heard egging Joaquin about “The Woman Who Had Two Navels,” asking the already slurring Joaquin, obviously because of beer, what the story is all about because they haven’t read it.

This delightful, rare audio recording done on September 8, 1977, is being kept by De La Salle University Libraries. It also has Joaquin singing Cole Porter’s “You’re The Top” with his own, improvised lyrics. Dalena used this for the closing credits.

There’s the footage of Joaquin giving his acceptance speech for the 1996 Ramon Magsaysay Awards, showing how vibrant and engaging Joaquin was to his audience, almost every sentence is punctuated with laughter.

Perhaps the most valuable footage Dalena got was Joaquin at work. He is seen in his library, typing a story on a manual typewriter, with a bottle of San Miguel Beer beside him. It was from documentarist Butch Nolasco’s award-winning “Siglo Filipino: Odyssey of a Nation,” whose script was written by Joaquin.

Savor again this educational, highly engaging, entertaining docu drama, along with more than 170 films in the 4th PPP on fdcpchannel.ph.