"The Woman in the Septic Tank," a Satire by Marlon Rivera The young filmmakers in the Filipino director Marlon Rivera's satire "The Woman in the Septic Tank" are creatures of privilege. They drive around Manila in a nice car, drink fancy coffees and fiddle with their abundant Apple products (MacBook: check; iPad: check; iPhones: got "em). Courtesy of the filmmaker Eugene Domingo in the title role in "The Woman in the Septic Tank," a satirical look at ambition by Marlon Rivera. When it comes to making a film, though, they choose poverty as their subject, not out of social conscience but out of pure calculation. They want to go to foreign film festivals, and dream of winning Oscars. The movie they're planning, "With Nothing," piles on the pathos. A poor woman living in a trash-strewn slum feeds her seven children with one package of ramen noodles before, in desperation, selling her daughter to a pedophile. Or maybe her son: That seems more transgressive, and so, the director, Rainier (Kean Cipriano), and the producer, Bingbong (J M de Guzman), suspect, more appealing to international festival audiences. "The Woman in the Septic Tank," part of the Museum of Modern Art's continuing ContemporAsian series, basically has one intermittently funny joke about clueless, exploitative ambition. And about Mr. Rivera's catchily exploitative title: Rainier plans a shot with his lead actress in a septic tank. Mr. Rivera and his screenwriter, Chris Martinez, mix scenes of Rainier and company doing preproduction - "Wow, perfection," Rainier says when they find a slum with children picking through mountains of garbage - with three different versions of how a sequence in "With Nothing" might go. These versions are clever-enough, well-executed riffs on filmmaking styles and how they manipulate audiences. One is documentary-inflected, one a musical ("I'm burping my soul/I have one foot in the grave," starving-but-peppy slum dancers sing), one a weepy melodrama. They're all equally fake, of course, and equally out of touch with reality. Mr. Rivera, though, knows Rainier and Bingbong better than they know poverty, and his own manipulations are more good-natured than cynical. His movie hits its targets, but softly, more in amusement than in anger. The Woman in the Septic Tank Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan. Directed by Marlon Rivera; written by Chris Martinez; director of photography, Larry Manda; edited by Ike Veneracion; music by Vincent de Jesus; production design by Reji Regalado; produced by Mr. Martinez, Mr. Rivera, Josabeth Alonso and John Victor Tence; released by Contemporasian. At the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, Museum of Modern Art. In Filipino and Tagalog, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. WITH: Eugene Domingo (Mila), J M de Guzman (Bingbong), Kean Cipriano (Rainier) and Cai Cortez (Jocelyn).