The Movie
STORY (Kwento)
Toto was born with a cleft lip and a cleft palate and is teased by many as Ngongo – a local term used to call anyone with his type of speech impediment. But despite this, the 8 year old boy is very outspoken and opinionated, thanks to the positive reinforcement of his liberated and equally willful mother Aling Glenda, a single parent.
Oblivious to the attention his speech gets, Toto juggles his days criticizing his mother’s transient love life and providing moral support to her ailing aspiration to become a Japayuki – a female entertainer in Japan.
The boy must also, on a day to day basis, try to elude the neighborhood bully, Badong and help a chronic stray deaf boy (Ogoy) find his way home. There’s also his struggle with his class adviser, Miss Dimaculangan, who fully believes that the boy needs to be coddled and given special treatment by merit of his facial and verbal malformation.
Though the teacher’s brand of compassion might suit others, for Toto – a boy who grew up equipped with the understanding that he is just like everyone else – no more, no less, this segregation, as he would put it, is downright discriminatory.
So it was no surprise to anyone that one day, the boy challenges his teacher after being excluded from a very important class song. An altercation that he wins hands down.
But things take a turn when the boy changes his mind and jumps on the prospect of competing on his school’s creative declamation competition – a contest of narrative drama and eloquence set on the very high-profiled Linggo ng Wika (National Language Week) celebration.
While Ms. Dimaculangan convinces herself that this new development poses a much bigger problem, Toto’s mother sees this as an opportunity for her son to shine.
With the help of his mother’s new fling, Dindo and her Japayuki friends, plus the support of the boy’s new found friends – a stray boy and a bully, Toto does manage to shine, quite brilliantly, in more ways than one.
CHARACTERS (Mga Tauhan)
Toto, Badong, Ogoy, Glenda, Ruby, Ms. Dimaculangan and Dindo
PRODUCTION STAFF
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
With Nono, I hope to tell a story about a little boy who thrives and shines by being different. Toto, our main character, is after all, a boy with a harelip. Instead of compounding the subject of physical malformation in the expected dreary, brooding narrative, I hope to provide a bright, whimsical but equally meaningful alternative that celebrates this particular physical condition as a source of inspiration rather than an antecedent to one’s misery.
More than anything else, Nono will be a story about a Filipino family – about a community that directly or indirectly mold the life of a little boy who possesses a willful, generous spirit.
