biography

Bernard Jay Mercado is an independent Filipino filmmaker and expanded cinema artist. His short films have been screened in various international and local film and art festivals. His most recent work, "Man in the Cinema House" (2015), an experimental black-and-white silent film comedy, is the recipient of the 2015 UP Film Institute Likha Adarna Best Thesis Film Award and represented the Philippines in the 3rd SalaMindanaw International Film Festival as the only Filipino short film in a selection of seven shorts; later, it was voted as one of the Top 10 Filipino Short Films of 2015 by the Filipino film community (Pinoy Rebyu). He also served as apprentice to screenwriters Roy Iglesias and Ricky Lee. With an individualistic, unique, avant-garde filmmaking voice, Mercado dreams to reinvent Philippine Cinema by going back to the classics. He is attempting to launch a new cinematic movement—the “expanded cinema play,” a hybrid of film and theater where the stage is an extension of the screen—of which “Man in the Cinema House” is a prototype.