For their diploma project, three film students go to the slums of the Philippines – and stage a drama.

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Philippino students set out to make an art film to conquer the world’s film festivals, with hopes of garnering an Oscar nomination. The plot they think up deals with an impoverished mother who sells her daughter to a pedophile in desperation. Through their project, the naïve young filmmakers experience the reality of the purely commercial movie business, which uses them for its own ends.

What is a good idea on paper is nothing more than a series of lengthy, superficial episodes. Nonetheless, former advertizing filmmaker Marlon N. Rivera’s The Woman in the Septic Tank did well at film festivals – mainly because movie insiders love seeing themselves onscreen and because the film has an “exotic” bonus. The movie is not worth seeing, though. What was intended as an intelligent satire about the mainstream movie industry and pseudo-intellectual low budget movies is in reality unwittingly amateurish.