Meet wedding filmmakers (and real-life couple) Jake & Bardo

February 27, 2018

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Cover photo by Regine David

William Shakespeare once said, “Journeys end in lovers meeting.” I, William Rigonan, say, “Happily ever afters begin in lovers wedding.” Despite the great possibility of divorce (but yay, we might one day welcome it in modern Philippine society) and the heteronormative origins of marriage, a wedding can also represent a couple’s certainty for each other, whether they’re gay, straight, or simply certain about landing a green card.

Real-life couple Jake Jereza and Bardo Wu, whose production company Good Wolf Films is shifting from advertising to wedding documentary, aim to capture the magical—and not-so-magical—moments of a couple’s journey to the altar, embracing the tireless efforts two people spend constantly reconfiguring themselves for each other. “We want to talk about the good parts and the bad parts,” says Jake. “A wedding is a celebration, and a celebration becomes much more powerful if everyone knows how hard it was to get to that point.”

Photo by JL Javier

Avoiding the musically manipulative, sugarcoated filter of your usual prenup video, Jake and Bardo tell their stories without inhibition, featuring the sort of truth that many videographers neglect to show. It’s a trademark seen in their past projects, a few notable ones being the TEAM Presents series that featured the stories of gay men and couples alike—long-time lovers Mario & Stephen, drag queen Gigi, and Pao, Rhex, and Pablo, a gay couple who welcomed their first son recently.

Through their videos, Jake and Bardo highlight the the sweet, the bitter, and everything in between. In their new foray, wedding videos won’t be spared from their more sober outlook.

Currently, they’re working on shooting a wedding video in Amsterdam for a lesbian couple—a project accomplished through a crowdfunding campaign on The Spark Project. However, realizing that the couple’s queerness overshadowed the couple’s love story, Jake and Bardo decided to focus on the inspirations behind their wedding films instead. “We were out of line by sort of waving their story around and making them LGBT poster girls when what they really wanted was honesty and privacy,” they said. “And so, in continuing with this project, we’re going to keep our hearts and minds open for the real story, not to treat it as a queer story about a queer marriage, but as a human story about a human marriage. I guess what we want to show is sameness despite the difference and not difference for its own sake.”

Love is sincere and free of performative emotions, and Jake and Bardo hope to illustrate the genuine, authentic feelings a couple has for each other amid all the hardships that go into making a relationship work. “It’s not about playing up our human experience or playing up the conflict for the sake of making a story compelling,” says Bardo. “It’s more about staying grounded and honest about our real experiences, our real insights, our real emotions.” With sincerity, Jake and Bardo chronicle the crazy beautiful moments that make life worth living and a love worth fighting for.