Celeste Cortesi’s next era hits the big screen: A baby, a beauty brand, an unscripted show

August 10 ------ Celeste Cortesi has spent the past year living her most private moments in front of cameras. She watched it back in public for the first time, on the big screen, with a full cinema watching alongside her.

Manila-based production company Goat Creative Studios marked its official launch with a media event and advance screening of “Celeste Unscripted” at Greenbelt Cinema 4 in Makati City, giving the press a first look at the docuseries before it premiered Saturday, Aug. 8.

Even after Cortesi lived through one of the most talked-about heartbreaks in Philippine pageantry, she never left the spotlight. The campaigns kept coming, her beauty brand grew, and the headlines about her private life wrote themselves. What the public never got was her side of the story. “In pageantry, when I do interviews, I am very scripted. So this is the first time that people really get to see my private life and everything that happened after Miss Universe — more of my personality,” Cortesi told the audience at the question-and-answer session that followed the screening. “It’s not easy to see yourself there in a very vulnerable state. But it’s the first time that people see a different side of me,” she added.

The series, created by Daytime Emmy Award-winning producer Michael Carandang, traces her journey “from beauty queen to beauty mogul” as she runs and grows her cosmetics line Asul, navigates an increasingly public relationship with partner Jonathan Sterling, and lets the public see into a life she once kept fiercely private.

Almost by accident

The show itself, Cortesi said, began almost by accident. “We were thinking, why not do an unscripted reality show about me and what happened after Miss Universe,” she said. “We started filming everything. We never stopped, so it was very natural.”

The series also follows the most personal decision of her year: choosing, with Sterling, to start a family. Wanting to become a mom is something Cortesi never admitted until just recently, and the series follows what going for it actually took — the unfiltered road to getting pregnant, battling changes, and adapting to every challenge that came with it, all captured as it unfolded.

“When I met Johnny, I felt like I wanted to settle down, and this was the person that I wanted to marry and the person I wanted to build a family with,” Cortesi said. “We were not even a year together when we wanted to have a baby. It felt right — and I’m pregnant now.”

Sterling, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who has generally kept his personal life private, said stepping in front of the cameras was a deliberate choice. “I’m usually the person behind the camera — supporting, holding the fan, bringing the snacks, making sure she’s okay,” he said. “We planned to put out the docuseries to give the full picture, the real picture, the honest picture about our lives, because so many people are going to tell stories about us anyway that are not true. We would rather do it ourselves and show you our truth.”

Source: inquirer.net