Dreamboi 🔞

🙂🔞 Dreamboi, dir. Rodina Singh, 2025, Philippines, 84 min., in Filipino and English with English subtitles throughout
Tuesday, June 23, 2026, 7:15 PM, Roxie Theater
🇺🇸 U.S. premiere
⚠️ contains several scenes of “almost explicit” sex, some flashing lights

Dreamboi

Frameline blurb: With its candy-coated color palette, Rodina Singh effortlessly blends the visual styles of impressionistic horror — think I Saw the TV Glow and Mandy — and the pages of Blueboy magazine to create a bold fever dream of trans sexuality and desire, and their power to sustain life.

Diwa (EJ Jallorina) likes to listen. Every night, she escapes the drudgery of her day job and the implicit and explicit transphobia of any aspect of daily life by listening to audio erotica by her favorite underground content creator: Dreamboi (Hello, Stranger's Tony Labrusca). Through his voice, she is able to access lush fantasies of a life defined by sexuality and desire, rather than fear.

When — deep in the one dingy sub-basement bathroom where she won’t be harassed — she stumbles upon Dreamboi in the flesh having sex with a stranger, the line between Diwa’s fantasies and realities starts to blur. Threatened with censorship after receiving not one but two X ratings by the Philippine government’s motion picture review board — just like Lino Brocka’s 1988 masterpiece Macho Dancer, which is screening in a new 4K restoration at Frameline50 — Dreamboi marks the arrival of a major new talent in international and trans cinema.

My take: I am relatively unfamiliar with Filipino culture, especially the underground LGBTQ+ scene. That made it a bit difficult to track the story, especially when Miwa’s fantasies and reality begin to blur together. It was also rather prone to melodramatic excess, which was a bit of a problem because EJ Jallorina doesn’t do a very credible job of crying most of the time. Also, late in the film, there are flashbacks lasting literally a fraction of a second, switching the scene repeatedly before you can get any sense of how this scene fits with the one before or the one after, not to mention being hard on the old optic nerve. I was a bit underwhelmed, but Dreamboi is breaking new ground, so I will give it a tepid recommended with reservations. If you’re already a fan of Filipino film, go see it, but otherwise it’s more or less a coin toss.

The dialogue is mostly in Filipino, which can switch between Filipino, English, and Spanish words, multiple times within a sentence. Fortunately, the English subtitles track all of the dialogue, including the bits that are just in English.

Just in case you’re curious, the setting is the Barangay Bagong Pag-asa in Quezon City in Metro Manila, which is home to a lot of trans folk. As far as I can tell, Mama Guada’s boarding house (do take a careful look at the expansion of LGBT+ on the sign in front) is fictional, as is Baylan Street, though I have to wonder if that’s a reference to “babaylan,” a traditional, pre-colonial healer, as seen in the short Babaylan in the Homegrown Shorts program.

• IMDb • Official website • Filmmaker • Instagram: @DreamboiXX • Facebook • preview • Wikipedia •