It all started with the multi-awarded movie Die Beautiful starring Paolo Ballesteros as the transgender woman Trisha, whose death came right after she was finally crowned as a beauty queen. During Trisha’s wake, her best friend Barbs would grant the latter’s wish to be presented as a different Hollywood star each night of the wake.
Barbs, played by award-winning actor Martin del Rosario, continued her journey in Die Beautiful’s spinoff movie, Born Beautiful, shown in cinemas in January.
In Born Beautiful, Barbs would go on with her life as a mortuary beautician, where her life would take interesting turns including an overwhelming identity crisis, which would have her questioning her gender preference and would see her attempting to go back to her born identity, that of a straight man.
If you couldn’t have enough of Del Rosario’s portrayal of Barbs, and, yes, even of Trisha who still appears in the series as an imaginary ghost, then you are in for a great treat as Cignal Entertainment has just added the series adaptation of Born Beautiful in its roster of original, must-watch videos. The series is the full-length—uncut and unfiltered—version of the movie hailed as one of the bravest and funniest Filipino films ever.
“Born Beautiful was originally planned as a series, before Cignal Entertainment and our partners decided to launch it as a movie. Now, the audience could have the best of both worlds as they had the movie first, and now the series where they can watch never-before-seen scenes, and thus have better appreciation of the story and its characters,” said Cignal Entertainment President and CEO Jane Basas.
Follow Barbs’ journey and “immerse” in the colorful life of members of the LGBT community in each 30 minute-or-so episode of the series. Cignal Entertaiment has started serving the first two episodes, which you can now stream on demand at Cignal Play. One episode each of the 12-part series will be dropped every Monday until the last episode on June 10.
Directed by Perci Intalan, Born Beautiful is produced by Cignal Entertainment, the original content division of Cignal TV, the country’s largest pay-TV platform; Octobertrain Films and The IdeaFirst Company, which produced Die Beautiful, among other acclaimed films and series.
