Tikoy Aguiluz

Tikoy Aguiluz earned respect for building lasting structures in Philippine cinema. The four separate grants from the Asian Cultural Council across more than twenty-five years marked him as one of the few directors to receive repeated international recognition of that kind. His creation of the Cinemanila festival in 1999 gave independent voices an annual stage at a time when commercial studios dominated local screens. That combination of personal output and institutional support set him apart from peers who focused only on their own films.