‘Open Endings’ runs Nov. 14 to 23 at Gateway Cineplex and other theaters in Metro Manila. There are two special screenings of Moneyslapper this Saturday, Nov.8, 1pm and 5pm, both with talkback sessions at UP Film Center (Cine Adarna), UP Diliman.
2025 has been good for Jasmine Curtis-Smith as she divides her time between acting for several films and after 10 years, embracing theater again. Her recent role as queer woman in the LGBTQ-plus-themed Open Endings in the recent Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival earned the nod of critics. She shared the Best Ensemble Performance award in the 21st Cinemalaya Film Festival, with actresses Janella Salvador, Klea Pineda, and Leanne Mamonong.
Related story: Cinemalaya: ‘You are important because we need stories that document history’
The film is about four queer women who, at some point in their lives, were lovers and now have become the best of friends. Their friendship is tested when Curtis-Smith’s character named Hannah Gabrielle Lopez, ironically described as the sensible one, suddenly announces she’s about to get married, not to another woman but to a straight guy, an officemate who’s been wooing her for years.
Lovers turned best friends are the characters played by Klea Pineda, Janella Salvador, Leanne Mamonong, Jasmine Curtis-Smith in ‘Open Endings’ that runs Nov. 14-23 at Gateway Cineplex and Manila theaters.
This is her second time to play lesbian, the first being Baka Bukas, which won her the Best Actress award in the 2016 Cinema One Originals Film Festival.
In Baka Bukas, she played a millennial lesbian who falls in love with her best friend.
“I know a lot of people who are part of the LGBTQ plus community, my brother himself is one, and being a part of Baka Bukas and now Open Endings, I realized we still live in a very conservative country, predominantly very religious, and obviously, we don’t talk about it often,” she said in an earlier interview. “In some cases, it’s not encouraged because it’s viewed differently. For me it’s important, because we have to shed light, tell their stories, and make people realize, this is reality. This is not a mask they put on. So, it’s important to be part of the dialogues in our country because it’s normal.”
The journey of four queer women in Open Endings (Contributed photo)
Open Endings, directed by Nigel Santos, will also have its Southeast Asian premiere, as it competes in the Asian Next Wave category in this year’s QCinema International Film Festival, running from Nov. 14 to 23 at Gateway Cineplex and other theaters in Metro Manila.
In last year’s QCinema, she was part of the cutting-edge, satirical thriller film Moneyslapper by Bor Ocampo, playing Jessa, the lover to John Lloyd Cruz’s character named Daniel.
Daniel, a loser in every sense of the word, leaves his small town after winning one of the biggest prizes in the lottery. Before he disappears, he meets Jessa, another troubled character seeking a better, freer life. They travel the world together for an epicurean life full of misadventures. Five years later, they return to their old hometown in the hope of rebuilding more worthwhile connections to the loved ones they left behind and take revenge on those who made their lives miserable.
Incidentally, it was Cruz’s last appearance in a film. It was also an entry in the Asian Next Wave category, where Cruz won Best Actor. Though it was shot as early as 2022, Moneyslapper, due to sensitive subjects it tackles, such as religious fanaticism and masturbation as a form of escape, was shown only two years later, and is now being toured in festivals here and abroad.
We can’t help but ask Curtis-Smith if she still bumps into the-now reclusive former heartthrob and most sought-after leading man.
“We meet on some casual occasions, and he’s very private na. I think he’s focused on visual arts, among other things,” she told TheDiarist.ph during the QCinema news conference Oct. 21, 2025.
Related story: ‘Ako pala’y isang hangal’—How John Lloyd Cruz’s ‘indefinite leave’ led to ‘emancipation’
Early this year, Curtis-Smith said she finished shooting The Time That Remains for Netflix Philippines. She plays the younger version of Lilia in a love story between an aging woman (played by Bing Pimentel) and an immortal man (Carlo Aquino). (On view on Netflix)
Ten years since her theater debut in Sandbox Collective’s original, ‘No Filter: Let’s Talk About Me,’ Curtis-Smith returned onstage in Guelan Luarca’s ‘3 Upuan’
In March, she played the wife of JC Santos’ character in Journeyman for Puregold Cinepanalo film festival.
Jasmine Curtis-Smith returns to theater after 10 years. (Photo by Kyle Venturilo courtesy of Scene Change)
Santos plays a professional boxer “who earns a living by making his opponent look good during a match.” In an review by Dennis Ladaw for TheDiarist.ph, he describes Journeyman as “a beautifully crafted movie.”
Related story: JC Santos and Jasmine Curtis-Smith shine in Journeyman
Ten years since her theater debut in Sandbox Collective’s original, No Filter: Let’s Talk About Me, Curtis-Smith returned onstage in Guelan Luarca’s 3 Upuan for the Scene Change group, which had a limited 10-show run until Oct. 26 at The Foyer at the Ateneo Art Gallery at Arete, Ateneo de Manila University, Loyola, Quezon City. And how, like a seasoned theater artist, she nailed the character Jai, a US-based journalist, with combined ease and intensity.
Paolo O’Hara, Cris Pasturan and Jasmine Curtis-Smith in Guelan Luarca’s ‘3 Upuan’ (Photo by Totel V. de Jesus)
Jai is the youngest and only sister of the eldest Jack, a humanities professor played by Paolo O’ Hara, and Jers, the depressive visual artist middle child played by Cris Pasturan.
Physically separated by personal ambitions, they are reunited to take care of their dying father in the hospital. In their time together, they reminisce about their growing-up years as they deal with personal issues and eventually, grief.
Paolo O’ Hara as Jack, Jasmine Curtis-Smith as Jai and Chris Pasturan as Jers. (Photo by Myra Ho courtesy of Scene Change)
After the main program in the QCinema press con where we cornered her for an interview, Curtis-Smith told TheDiarist.ph that it was her friendship with Giancarlo Abrahan, co-founder of Scene Change, that made her say yes to act in the play.
“But upon reading the material, I found out it was just so beautiful and hard to pass on,” she said. The director Luarca also wrote the text of 3 Upuan.
“The play has a profound understanding of grief, time, and life itself in general. When you join something like that, it’s beyond the work, beyond the acting. It’s like going through life and understanding each moment you perform it,” she said.
Abrahan is an award-winning filmmaker, and they first worked together in Hanna Espia’s Transit in the 2013 Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival. Abrahan wrote the Transit screenplay and Curtis-Smith, with others in the cast, won the Special Jury Citation for Best Acting Ensemble.
She said she began to experience again that addictive feeling of acting before a live audience. “When doing films, you only feel that if you sit with them in the movie house, but still it’s different because you are watching with them,” she said.
“In theater, since there are no second takes, it’s the ability to stand on your feet on the live stage and recall all these lines that have become part of yourself. When you see the people in front of you, how they interact with the text, when you see their faces, their changing emotions, how they are carried away by the scenes, the dialogues, napaka-satisfying for a performer,” she added.
Her initial foray into theater was through the invitation of director Toff De Venecia, co-founder of Sandbox Collective.
“Before he ran for Congress, he was editor of a youth magazine and a lifestyle youth section of a newspaper, and he invited me to contribute as writer. When Sandbox came out with an original play about millennials, he invited me to act.”
No Filter: Let’s Talk About Me is a series of monologues about millennial experiences, staged in 2015. The play was a runaway success, so it had a second run, titled No Filter 2.0, and the monologues were published in a book with the same title.
Luarca, in our earlier interview, said the story ran when he was dealing with the death of his beloved literary father and mentor, Ricardo Abad (1946-2023). Abad started Arete as its first artistic director and was a long-time professor at Ateneo de Manila University.
3 Upuan is meant to be staged in an intimate setup, with no mics for the actors, so the feeling is like eavesdropping on your neighbors’ conversation. In a very limited first run, it was staged for two weekends only, in a 30-seat capacity in a dressing room on the second floor of Hyundai Hall at Areté in September, 2024. Luarca told this writer that, due to requests, they had to add 10 more seats, and that was the limit allowed by Arete management.
There were two more runs this year: in February at the Joselito & Olivia Campos Teaching Laboratory, at Areté, and in August, at Archivo Art Gallery, Makati City. All shows were sold out.
In those shows, Jack was played by Jojit Lorenzo, Jers by JC Santos, and Jai by Martha Comia. With Luarca, Abrahan, and lighting designer D Cortezano, they formed Scene Change, which was also behind the successful stage adaptation of Abrahan’s 2014 Cinemalaya best picture-winning film, Dagitab.
The same happened in this new iteration. All shows were sold out. They had to add two matinee shows, which were also sold out just a few hours after they were announced on Scene Change social media.
‘3 Upuan’ is meant to be staged in an intimate setup, with no mics for the actors so it feels like eavesdropping on your neighbors’ conversation
We saw the February run and everything still seems fresh to me. A performance is really memorable if I can’t shake off this habit of identifying the characters with the actors long after the run has ended. So whenever I bumped into them in the following days, I still saw Comia and Santos as siblings dealing with grief.
I continue to see Jojit Lorenzo in the stage and movie versions of Vincent de Jesus’ 2017 musical Changing Partners, which seems to have stuck with me for almost eight years now, like a Carmen Ghia scene in The Producers. In Changing Partners, he played the older gay live-in partner of Sandino Martin’s character. In one scene, Martin’s character, the pabebe (immature, attention-seeking) type, refused to drink regular grocery store Lipton Tea. He was looking for something like Twinings’ Earl Grey. With arms akimbo and raised eyebrows, Lorenzo exclaimed something like, “Dyusko, at bakit ayaw mo ng Lipton Tea? Kahit si Queen Elizabeth, umiinom ng Lipton Teeeaaa?” So every time I see a Lipton Tea bag, I laugh or smile.
Now, after experiencing this version of 3 Upuan with Pasturan, O’Hara, and Curtis-Smith, re-telling the story of Jack, Jers, and Jai, it’s like I saw the play again for the first time. They simply effortlessly owned the characters.
I’ve known O’Hara and Pasturan since they were members of Tanghalang Pilipino’s Actors’ Company a few decades ago, and their chemistry onstage is time-tested. Even if they took a long break from theater, they could still come back and give an excellent performance. In 2023, they did the two-hander Fermata, a play by Dustin Celestino and directed by Guelan Luarca for the Virgin Labfest Festival at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. It was the revisited set, and they took over from the original cast of Basti Artadi and Xander Soriano. It deals with childhood trauma, the process of healing and redemption. In a later encounter, we told Pasturan that he and O’Hara could play Estragon and Vladimir in a modern classic like Waiting For Godot because of their highly commendable chemistry onstage. He told me they actually did, though playing other characters, for TP’s version, a few decades ago.
O’ Hara is a very spontaneous actor. In an earlier scene where he’s about to explain something on the white board in a classroom, there were latecomers in the audience. He said, “O, para sa mga latecomers, hanap na kayo ng upuan, paki-silent ang phones nyo, ha.” He paused as others in the audience laughed and waited for the latecomers to sit down.
Curtis-Smith told TheDiarist.ph there are plans to do another run early next year, since all shows were sold out.
Before 2025 ends, she will star with Piolo Pascual in Rae Red’s crime drama Manila’s Finest, an entry in the Metro Manila Film Festival. Pascual plays Lt. Homer Magtibay, a seasoned cop, during the First Quarter Storm of the ’70s, investigating a murder case involving teenagers in the Manila slums.
“I’ve been blessed this year because I started the first half of the year with three films, then the play for the third quarter. In the last two months, I will be focused on finishing Manila’s Finest,” Curtis-Smith said.
After playing co-lead with the finest actors like Cruz, Pascual, Aquino, and Santos in movies and teleplays, she has successfully carved a name for herself, especially in theater. She’s not just the younger sister of the very famous Anne Curtis-Heusaff.
For the meantime, she stays in our memory as Jai in 3 Upuan, delivering her opening monologue: “I learned sa US what time actually meant. Not as some abstract thing or a thing you know exists but whose existence is taken for granted, like oxygen, or the idea of a multiverse, an idea which though provocative is hardly actionable—there’s nothing you can do about its theoretical existence.
“At least not obviously, immediately. Then one day, I noticed how the trees in Central Park by Columbus Circle started changing color, and I started putting all those second-hand jackets I’d bought in Anonas (Street, Quezon City) to good use—and the stink of summer, the smell of piss and ganja in New York turned into stale, cold air—time moving eventually existed as a positive presence, not some psychological construct but the lived experience of metabolizing, of leaves, of resetting my system…”
