Critics Campus 2026 participant Andrew Cordon explores the imagery and political commentary at the heart of Filipiñana, a film that takes a swing at the ongoing impacts of colonisation and economic inequality in the Philippines.

A tourist bus makes its final stop before heading to its destination: a country club with a lush golf course and a pristine pool – a sanctuary from Manila’s scalding humidity. An employee boards the bus, equipped with a microphone. With a radiating smile, she announces, “Mabuhay!”, which literally translates to ‘long live’: a blessing for good health and prosperity. Her chirpy spirit impenetrable to the sweltering heat, she is the embodiment of the cordial hospitality for which the Philippines is renowned. The bus suddenly halts as a seemingly endless line of Filipino locals block the road, carrying an assortment of bottles and containers, patiently waiting their turn to access clean water. Long live? Some of these people could die of heatstroke if the line doesn’t move any quicker.

Rafael Manuel’s Filipiñana is rife with this kind of pointed symbolism that addresses the stark wealth gap in the Philippines. Expanding his Silver Bear–winning 2020 short film of the same name, the feature follows 17-year-old Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), the country club’s newest ‘tee girl’. Her job on the golf course is to simply replace the ball after every swing. It is monotonous, repetitive work – typical of Filipino consumer culture that places the client on a pedestal while service workers are rendered invisible. Literally invisible, in this case: Isabel is often on the floor and out of sight, or else framed on the green between golfers’ open legs.

Isabel oscillates between curiosity and interrogation as she drifts through the country club like a fresh ball on the green, slowly developing a strange fascination with the club’s sixtysomething president, Dr Palanca (Teroy Guzman). With each interaction between Isabel and the course’s clients and staff, Manuel’s critique of the Philippines’ contradicting power structures sharpens.

On the surface, Filipiñana may seem to drone on – at least, compared to the hallmark melodrama that Philippine cinema is known for. Following its Sundance premiere, the film’s strategic blocking and symmetrical framing were quickly compared to those from Wes Anderson’s similarly precise universe. Certainly, the retro-futuristic production design of Manuel’s feature is dipped in candy-like pastel; the stillness feels serene yet uncanny. But beneath the Anderson-esque imagery is an eerie sense of otherworldliness, a deceptive coldness that is more reminiscent of Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1969) than The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

This visual syntax is furthered through portrayals of movement, as the employees stack chairs, sweep floors and clean the pool with precise synchronisation. Like cogs, they merely make up the grandiose machine that churns out an endless supply of “Coming right up!”s and “Anything else, sir?”s. Their industriousness evokes bayanihan, the traditional Philippine system of mutual assistance in which members of a community work together to accomplish a difficult task or, more generally, the spirit of civic unity among Filipinos. But the country club that employs them is a paradox: the workers’ generosity and cooperation exist side by side with their poverty. Likewise, Manuel himself has called the golf course an “absurd” space, one whose well-kept greenery belies the history of golf as a British export and tool for gentrification. This land conceals a cycle of inaction and complicity – as if golf wasn’t already absurd enough.

Filipiñana

The contradictions of the golf course mirror the dilemma of Filipino culture itself. Filipinos have a tendency to desire change while simultaneously supporting the very thing that restricts their growth; the country’s oft-cited ‘colonial mentality’ perfectly exemplifies this. Manuel depicts the dilemma symbolically through the continuous planting of pine trees, an imported commodity that the tropical environment naturally rejects. Yet the workers unquestioningly and laboriously replace each dying tree with a brand-new one, repeating the cycle. Tensions like this are deftly embedded into every facet of the film, whose expansive commentary purposely tests both our patience and our knowledge of Philippine history. The questions that Filipiñana asks aren’t just cutesy mini-golf-hole-with-windmill side quests; rather, they’re PGA Tour championship swings aiming to dismantle colonial institutions.

The complexity of Manuel’s film allows for a depiction of class that transcends the eye-roll-inducing ‘eat the rich’ formula that has risen in popularity on contemporary Western screens. We get it, something is off about this place. What next, creepy old people? Interestingly enough, there are no Westerners in Filipiñana, exposing the magnitude of the residual damage left by colonisation in the Philippines: a nation whose centuries-long colonial past with Spain and the United States has left its inhabitants with an aspirational identity crisis. Unlike Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness (MIFF 2022), Filipiñana leaves no room for a power fantasy. In Östlund’s puke-tacular, the sole Filipino survivor (played by Dolly de Leon) is a toilet cleaner turned autocrat who gets to enact retribution on her wealthier, mediocre white counterparts in a third-act twist of fate. In Manuel’s film, there is no such catharsis – just a subdued apathy that saturates the country club’s atmosphere, a helplessness inside each blank-faced employee whose vitality is stripped away by a crushing sense of obligation.

Yet, even through all of this, Filipiñana provides a glimmer of hope. Both native and diasporic Filipino youth are expressing interest in the film; this acknowledgement and awareness make me truly hopeful for change, channelling the spirit of bayanihan through the shared act of storytelling. One day, we may be able to finally abolish not only colonialism, but more importantly: golf.

Filipiñana screens on Wednesday 12 and Friday 21 August as part of the MIFF 2026 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.