Christopher de Leon (left) and Hilda Koronel in “Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising”
It has been 40 years since its premiere, but Mike de Leon’s “Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising” remains to be the gold standard when it comes to romantic movies set in the country’s summer capital, Baguio.
The 1977 movie classic, digitally remastered and restored, returns to select SM Cinemas this week (starting today, Aug. 4, up to Aug. 10), as part of Cine Lokal and ABS-CBN’s Sagip Pelikula campaign.
The love story topbills Christopher de Leon as a struggling music student who falls for a married woman, portrayed by Hilda Koronel, who’s trapped in a loveless union.
Koronel told the Inquirer that she had received a copy of the restored movie from the ABS-CBN Archives. “I just watched it with my husband Ralph (Moore) last Sunday,” she recounted. “It was fun and definitely brought back a lot of memories—all good!”
Her son Diego likewise caught the classic film “for the first time. He actually loved it!”
Scene from the movie
She brimmed with happiness and pride because her old movies, like Lino Brocka’s “Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag” and “Insiang,” had been saved from deterioration and neglect. “It’s wonderful. These films form part of our legacy.”
She hailed De Leon as “a great cinematographer and director.” They previously worked on “Maynila,” where De Leon was the director of photography.
“We had a good working relationship,” she recounted. “But the shoot [for ‘Kung Mangarap’] wasn’t always easy. We had to go up and down Baguio for about three months.”
Making things extra challenging, she was on her senior year in Maryknoll College at the time.
“I had to excuse myself for one semester to finish this film,” she explained. “It was my last semester, so I ran into some trouble and that moved my graduation date to a later time.”
Still, she persisted.
“I saw the potential of the film and really loved the script [by De Leon and Ray Santayana],” she asserted. “I wanted to do it, and I had no regrets. I’m glad I did it. It’s a fabulous film.”
She reminisced about shooting the picnic scene, which showed morning fog creeping up the grove.
“We had to be up at 4 a.m. to get ready for those scenes,” she quipped. “I had to set my own hair and do my own makeup—which was almost nothing, really.”
De Leon (left) and Koronel
They had to move quickly to catch the early-morning fog. “We had to be done at a certain time. And it was so cold in Baguio! It was hard to get up and take a shower that early. Ugh!”
She pointed out that the film had succeeded in immortalizing on celluloid the City of Pines in all its pristine glory, before it was forever changed by the 1990 earthquake and the inevitability of progress.
“The trees are no longer there and the city is way too crowded already… unlike before,” she conceded.
Shooting in Sagada was memorable, as well. “Sagada was beautiful. I loved it there, but the trip to get there was a bit daunting since the road, as shown in the movie, was very narrow,” she quipped.
She hopes that the youth, like her son Diego, would fall in love with the film, and the idyllic memories of Baguio that it presents.