One of the biggest compliments Filipino director Soxie Topacio gets on his new film, Grandpa Is Dead (Ded na si Lolo), is that it looks so real.

"Everyone
keeps coming up to me and saying that," the director said. This
low-budget family comedy was shot in just six days, the same amount of
time the family in the story has to grieve over the death of their
patriarch, Juanito Hernandez.

The film begins with Juanito's
family members receiving the news that he has died. This starts a chain
reaction of fainting, which the youngest family member, Bobet
(11-year-old actor B.J. Forbes), just doesn't understand. But the
fainting is a tradition — one of many rituals and superstitions of
grieving a loved one's death that Topacio portrays in his film, spoken
entirely in Tagalog.

"My mother was like that, my uncle was like that, I was like that," Topacio says, laughing.

Over
the course of a six-day wake, the adult children uncover their parents'
major secret, which then helps them heal old wounds. It's clear that
the film has a special significance for Topacio, who says the backbone
of this story is its autobiographical nature; Bobet represents who he
was as a boy, watching his family as they grieved the loss of their
patriarch.

But in every adult-oriented family film, there must
be a dress-wearing son. From the moment Junee (Roderick Paulate)
sashays down the dark Manila street where his family lives and up to
his father's casket in a bright red evening gown, he steals the show.
Watching this movie, you expect Junee's character, a gay man dressed as
a woman who sells, um, "happiness," to be annoyingly over-the-top, but
thankfully he isn't. In fact, Junee is the one shouting the voice of
reason over and alongside his fainting sisters, in a warm, familiar
tone that makes him endearing throughout the film.