“Some of my character’s insecurities stemmed from that,” says Rhian Ramos who plays Shana. It gives prosopagnosia some room and explores how such a disease affects a person in their everyday life, how insecure or small they might be prone to feeling, how introverted and private they might tend to be, and how it affects the creation of memories without having visuals as an anchor.
And while this sounds like a disorder that is ripe for movie writers’ picking (I mean, haven’t we, at this point, heard of every possible heart ailment, terminal illness, and congenital disease in the book), Kung Paano Siya Nawala doesn’t just use it as a plot point or a means to propel the story forward. Those diagnosed with the neurological disorder have an inability to recognize faces, and in extreme cases even their own faces are foreign to them. It’s not a fantastical disease (even though it sounds like one), and its proper name is prosopagnosia. In Joel Ruiz’s Kung Paano Siya Nawala, JM de Guzman’s character deals with an uncommon affliction called face blindness.
But what if you were physically incapable of establishing that imprint, and every face was entirely forgettable, regardless of your relationship to them? What if every time you saw that same person - your mother, your father, or even someone you’re initially attracted to - they looked entirely different, even if they sounded the same and had similar mannerisms? You see a familiar face and run through your mental Rolodex trying to remember their name and place exactly where you met or how you know them. MANILA, Philippines - Every now and again, it happens. ‘You don’t need to have face blindness to know what it’s like to be scared to be in over your head in love… the rest are things that are necessary to go through before we’re ready to be in a real relationship.’ In ‘Kung Paano Siya Nawala’ a woman falls in love with a man diagnosed with face blindness.