How a Filipino country music coming-of-age film earned the mainstream spotlight

Our  AAPI Heritage Month Celebration of Creative Excellence shines a light on Jeremiah Abraham, a Filipino-American producer and award-winning PR and marketing strategist. 

Manila-born Abraham moved to Los Angeles when he was five years old. After 15 years working in marketing for the entertainment industry at companies including Disney and Warner Brothers, in March 2020, Abraham he opened his own firm, Tremendous Communications. Projects from throughout his career include marketing for major franchises including Harry Potter, Star Wars, Marvel, DC Entertainment, as well as “Crazy Rich Asians.” More recently, his company Tremendous Communications supported A24’s publicity and grassroots team for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and is involved in comedian Jo Koy’s upcoming film, “Easter Sunday.”

Abraham’s production credits include being co-producer on “Lingua Franca,” distributed by Ava DuVernay’s Array Now and he’s also a producer on the upcoming series “Concepción.” Abraham lives in Brooklyn with his husband of more than ten years and their Shiba Inu, Geordie.

Here, Abraham shares his work as co-producer and marketer of Sony Pictures’ “Yellow Rose,” the 2019 coming-of-age film from Home Away Productions. Directed by Diane Paragas, it tells the story of Rose, a Filipina illegal immigrant  who lives in a Texas small town and aspires to become a country music star. 

As CEO and Founder of Tremendous Communications, Asian American and Filipino American representation is incredibly important and at the core of our work. One project that I’m really proud of is Diane Paragas’ film “Yellow Rose.” 

Yellow Rose is a story of a Filipina teen from a small Texas town who fights to pursue her dream as a country music performer. Our team was extremely excited to be on board as it was an important story to tell because it helped shed light on immigration and diaspora experiences that our community faces each day.

We were not only the publicity and marketing leads for this, but I was eventually asked to become a co-producer of the film.

Our work involved positioning and promoting the film from pre-production to release, then through studio acquisition and wide global release. 

From a publicity standpoint, we focused on outreach to general market, Asian Americans, Filipino communities across the globe. This ranged from features in national media outlets like Teen Vogue, Variety, Deadline, NBC News, ET, Los Angeles Times, Broadway World—and popular Asian outlets such as ABS-CBN, NextShark and more. Tremendous helped amplify the key themes of the film, provided valuable media opportunities for the talent, and spotlighted the amazing work of the director Diane Paragas. Tremendous also activated key celebrities and community leaders around Yellow Rose, which was no simple task leading into a global pandemic.

I’m really proud of the two Teen Vogue pieces we placed, not just because of their prestige but also because it really helped shine a light on Filipino representation in Hollywood through two of our biggest stars Eva Noblezada and Lea Salonga. It helped show our value as Filipinos in Hollywood and also positioned “Yellow Rose” as a milestone in Asian American cinema.

To be honest, we wouldn’t have gotten where we were without the support of the AAPI community. One piece in particular was NBC News Asian America which was published very early on in our campaign. This one really sparked the excitement for the film and dug deeper into Why this film was needed and what we were trying to communicate with it. This one really helped to intensify our positioning as both a fun entertaining film with music and also a film that had something to say.

We also helped build partnerships with various Filipino businesses along with Diane. For example we partnered with viral sensation Kora Bakery who creates delicious and beautiful Filipino-inspired donuts in Queens, NY. We came up with a special edition set called “A Yellow Rose Story” which consisted of 3 flavors including Leche Flan Ni Lola (brioche stuffed with Lola Cora’s Famous Flan), Sans Rival (brioche, roasted cashews, cashew dacquoise, and Tanduay Rum buttercream), and Yellow Rose (cruller, mango curd, chantilly, fresh mango, and mango condensed milk glaze). The inspiration behind these flavors came from us blending together the traditional flavors that are known in the Philippines with youthful and fresh flavors to symbolize Rose in the film. We were able to capture this as a widely popular social media trend and create excitement leading up to the film’s release.

 

 

As both co-producer and publicist of the film, I was involved in many meetings with the director Diane Paragas and the producing team. I was able to help how we positioned the film to various audiences, how we strategize to film distributors, had a chance to provide feedback during the production, help connect our team to important advocates in Hollywood who really helped propel the film, and more. The whole team behind Yellow Rose – Diane Paragas, Cecilia Mejia, Ray Cuerdo, and Orian Willians – were incredible and they really worked so hard to make this movie such a huge success. Diane was the biggest advocate of the film and seeing her passion to really make this a success was incredibly inspiring.

 

 

The campaign was important to us because we were able to do this through beautiful storytelling and music which led to this film becoming one of the first Filipino American films to be acquired and distributed theatrically by a major Hollywood studio. Tremendous was able to help shape this narrative and hopefully open doors for even more projects and creatives down the line.

This film and our work helped spotlight the value and the humanity of the Filipino diaspora around the world. We’re not in this business for attention or glory, but to genuinely uplift our community’s visibility and inclusion. The success of films like “Yellow Rose” will help green light more of our stories in Hollywood, and I am very honored to have played a role in that.