I am a newspaper journalist by profession here in Salamanca for nine years already but I have long craved to become a film director. However, I don’t like to be studying in a Spanish film school and studying international relations at the University of Madrid is quite expensive for me so I opt to learn through distance learning. I have been doing distance learning since 2003. And believe me or not, it’s more than filmmaking that I have taken as a correspondence course.

Even if correspondence course is old-fashioned, it provides me more advantage than studying in an online course. I still keep the notes and handouts that they send to me through mail. In an online course, you cannot retrieve your handouts from the Internet because a) you cannot save them into your disk; and b) you cannot login to your student account once you have graduated. Therefore, I still opt for traditional distance education.

While working as a newspaper reporter here in Salamanca, I started taking up short courses through distant education. The first one that I took was TOEFL or Teaching of English as a Foreign Language. It took me roughly 18 months to finish the whole thing but my English was polished. Even though I’m working as a newspaper reporter here, I have also been hired by none other than AP as one of their stringers here because of my honed English skills.

Then I proceeded taking up filmmaking. The genre of filmmaking that I admire most is neo-realism but before I took up that kind of course, I first took the course on filmmaking around the world. I soon learned that there are lots of lucrative film industries around the world. In fact, I learned that whereas Hollywood in the United States makes $3 billion, the Bollywood industry in Mumbai makes a whooping $4 billion or $1 billion more. Wow, my inspiration has never been Spanish journalists in the most honest sense of the word. My inspiration and idol here in Spain is Antonio Banderas. I want to duplicate his feat. Aside from being a popular actor in the United States married to no less than my celebrity crush when I was still a teen, Melanie Griffith, Antonio Banderas owns a chain of restaurants here in Spain. And the food there is good because they adapt to a strict Mediterranean diet.

I also learned that the South Korean, the Japanese, the Mexican, the Taiwanese, the Malaysian and the Thai film industries are prolific as well. South Korea just made its biggest budgeted movie ever last year, D War, with a Hollywood cast that includes Jason Behr of Roswell fame. Hollywood has long copied the Japanese film industry. One Missed Call is an adaptation of a Japanese horror film. Cloverfield is J.J. Abrams’s version of Godzilla wrecking Manhattan. Ugly Betty is the Hollywood adaptation of a popular Mexican soap opera. Thai movies are mostly based from horror stories. I also learned that the Philippines is a frequent setting for South Korean, Taiwanese and South Korean films and music videos while Morocco is a frequent setting for Hollywood films.