'Pelikultura 2024' OMNIBUS REVIEW: Film Festival Competition Category

christ dustly go tanfilmreview

Apr 28

Written By Christ Dustly Go Tan

'Pelikultura 2024' OMNIBUS REVIEW: Film Festival Competition Category

Christ Dustly Go Tan April 28, 2025, 06:00 PM

Pelikultura 2024: The Calabarzon Film Festival returns with challenging new stories from the Southern Tagalog, as the competition category, which involves the Southern Tagalog Shorts Premiere and #BuhayElbi, focuses on each film’s content and filmmaker’s origins in the regions of Southern Tagalog. These short films, in their radical form, are already a testament to the wild imaginations of these filmmakers and their nuanced understanding, as these are selected for their contribution in creating meaningful conversation about the current state of Southern Tagalog and the Philippines as a whole. Here are the reviews of the official selection of the competition category:

Southern Tagalog Shorts Premiere

Inukit
by Elias Pernecita III

The decline of cultural capitals across the Philippines has become an emerging narrative where once-vibrant traditions tied to specific locales since immemorial time are gradually fading. Elias Pernecita III’s Inukit contributes to this discourse by turning its lens on Paete, Laguna, long celebrated as the Carving Capital of the Philippines. The short film offers a sobering portrait of a dying craft, charting the complex web of conditions that have led to the diminishing presence of the practice in the town’s cultural and economic life.

Inukit does more than lament a dying craft, as it also interrogates the systemic forces at play. It presents a multi-sided examination from environmental laws that restrict wood harvesting, to dwindling interest among the youth, and to a government that deflects responsibility rather than fostering sustainable support for the craft. What emerges is an understanding that no single factor can be blamed, but instead it is the intersection that collectively erodes what was once a thriving cultural identity.

As another part of Filipino heritage dwindling its presence, Inukit becomes not just a portrait of loss, but a call to recognize the fragility of traditions that are taken for granted.

KIYAW
by Jericho Jeriel

Discussions surrounding comfort women often center on the pursuit of justice and reparations from both the Japanese and Philippine governments, with the act of remembering positioned as an act of resistance. Jericho Jeriel’s KIYAW takes a different route, as rather than reiterating dominant narratives of victimhood, the short film dares to speculate on narratives centering on the forms of resistance that could have existed within the oppressive context of wartime.

History has long been written through a patriarchal lens, often marginalizing women’s roles and reducing them to domestic contributors or passive victims. KIYAW challenges this by exploring resistance not as survival through compliance but by depicting women who may have taken arms or exacted vengeance against their oppressors. Jeriel opens space for narratives that imagine comfort women not merely as victims of circumstance but as possible agents of rebellion.

The choice to use no dialogue, coupled with the protagonist’s double life, emphasizes the silence that surrounds these alternative histories, either born from social rejection and archival absence. The haunting final image of the woman performing as a geisha demonstrates how comfort women are often remembered as voiceless figures in the grand narrative of war, but KIYAW resists this narrative. Through speculative storytelling, Jeriel honors what might have been, offering a radical reinterpretation that refuses to let resistance be a forgotten narrative.

Pahimakas
by Angelika Espejo

Loneliness is a deeply human condition, but its manifestations in attempting to cope with it often take absurd forms, shaped by intersecting factors such as family and poverty. Angelika Espejo’s Pahimakas captures this absurdity through Marissa, an embalmer who finds comfort not among the living, but the dead. With only a handful of clients and no implications of social connections, Marissa’s funeral parlor becomes both her workplace and emotional refuge, a place where the dead offer a strange form of companionship that the living cannot.

Espejo frames Marissa’s interactions with the dead not as grotesque or morbid, but as acts of quiet yearning. When Marissa begins to show personal biased treatment toward one particular corpse, she exhausts her desire for comfort by talking and reflecting on the family who commissioned it, saying how lucky that person is. In her imagined conversations and tender care, she sees the dead as having more emotional weight and presence, while she exists in a state of hollowed absence. She longs for the warmth of a paternal figure

The short film says that this paternal longing is rooted in personal rejection, an estranged relationship with the father, and a similar feeling that he’s there, but doesn’t feel like he’s there. This speaks to a common societal problem with paternal figures being the silent, aching void left in many Filipino households. Espejo does not mock Marissa’s absurd coping mechanism, but instead, she humanizes it. Pahimakas shows how people navigate loneliness in unconventional ways, and in doing so, it extends empathy to those who find solace in the quietest, strangest corners of their grief.

No One Cries Forever
by Rogelio Postrado III

Pain, in all its shapes and sizes, is inescapable, and it is often in the face of unbearable pain that people begin to question whether life is worth enduring at all. Rogelio Postrados III’s No One Cries Forever enters this space of quiet desperation, interrogating whether the avoidance of pain leads to healing or merely deepens the wound itself. The short film doesn’t provide easy answers, but instead it navigates grief, isolation, and the seductive fantasy of escapism in a life untouched by suffering, only to peel back the illusion and show that avoidance is not healing but denial.

The short film follows Jackie, engulfed in loneliness, whose grief transforms her environment and perception of reality. The world she retreats into is serene, an aesthetic manifestation of her yearning to escape. In contrast, scenes grounded in emotional truth are dimly lit and show tremors as they visually communicate the disorientation and volatility of pain. These styles create cinematic tension between fantasy and reality, comfort and confrontation.

The haunting image of blindfolded figures wandering aimlessly evokes souls consumed by grief, those who, like Jackie, once believed that turning away from pain would bring peace, but instead, they become lost. Through these metaphors, Postrado asserts that pain, while brutal, is essential as it is grounded in reality and it teaches and transforms.

No One Cries Forever doesn’t glorify suffering, but it challenges the dangerous idea of living without it. Postrado III shows that confronting pain is not a sign of weakness, but of growth, and that healing begins not only by erasing pain, but by learning to live with it.

I Want To Be
by EJ Gualberto

Children create imaginary friends to find comfort, confidence, and a sense of companionship in moments when real-world connections feel out of reach. EJ Gualberto’s I Want To Be suggests this coping mechanism, while helpful, can also become a crutch that must eventually be relinquished to grow. The short film traces this through Arjay, a young boy who finds solace in B, his imaginary friend, until he begins to outgrow the emotional safety net B provides.

Gualberto handles this theme with tender care by emphasizing the value of imaginary friendship. In Arjay’s private, intimate spaces, B is not just a figment, but he’s his confidant and source of unconditional understanding. Arjay speaks freely to him, expressing desires and fears he cannot yet articulate to the people around him. These moments are rendered with quiet sincerity, and B’s vivid and colorful presence becomes a visual embodiment of Arjay’s inner world.

But as Arjay starts building real connections with his aunt and newfound friends, B begins to fade. His color dulls, he glitches, signaling Arjay’s slow detachment and his growing readiness to face life more independently. This captures the emotional weight of accepting change.

Gualberto doesn’t position imaginary friends as childish delusions to be discarded but rather as necessary companions during their formative period. I Want To Be recognizes emotional utility while gently affirming the importance of moving beyond them and learning when to lean on comfort and when to step forward alone.

Maryosep
by Miko Buan Acuña

Sacrilege, in today’s sociopolitical climate, often disguises itself as divine authority, where invoking the name of God becomes a tool to justify power, corruption, or even impunity. Miko Buan Acuña’s Maryosep boldly confronts this phenomenon by crafting an allegorical narrative that exposes how religion is weaponized to mask structural abuses and political opportunism.

Hesus is a stand-in for the messianic figure, engaging in conversation with a group of neighbors where each represents a facet of the country’s enduring “social cancer.” These exchanges are not just humorous but also critical, allowing them to reflect on the absurdity and tragedy of religious and political entanglement. Like Mike De Leon’s Kakabakaba ka ba?, Acuña leans into satire for delivering a narrative that is unafraid to offend for the sake of illuminating deeper truths.

Acuña weaves scenes that reveal how faith has been co-opted and commodified from caroling disguised as begging, and preachers invoking not for salvation but for survival. The short film illustrates how religion, once intended for moral grounding, has been twisted to serve the ambitions of the personal, powerful, and imperial. It implicates not just the politicians who parade pity for votes but also the complicity of systems that allow religion to be exploited for tax exemptions, social leverage, or even imperialistic gain.

Hesus’s failure to inspire his neighbors becomes a commentary on the failure of morality when it is now hollowed out by self-interest. Acuña doesn’t simply criticize religion, but rather its systemic distortion as a sacrilege not against God, but against the people who suffer under the illusion of divine guidance.

Padala
by Gian Arre

Duterte’s War on Drugs has taken a toll on dehumanizing extrajudicial killings as part of the new normal and just a mere number in the quota system, depriving them of the lives they once had. Gian Arre’s Padala resists this normalization by offering an introspection of remembrance, placing not only on the victims of EJK but on the grief of those left behind. The short film serves as both a lamentation and a political gesture, highlighting the personal weight of state violence that continues to haunt those left behind.

Padala’s choice to fragment its narrative across various common locations and relationships vignettes a testimony to the pervasive fear and fragility of life under the war on drugs. The banality of these moments contrasts with the horror of how suddenly life can be taken, as this positions everyone as a potential target, emphasizing how impunity operates indiscriminately.

The letters carry unresolved grief. They are written with what-ifs, apologies, longing, and rage, offering a glimpse into personal bonds that are severed prematurely. Through these letters, Padala reclaims the humanity of the victims, presenting them as lives that had meaning.

The final letter, meant for the courier, makes the statement that remembering has become an act of resistance. In a regime where calling for justice could mean calling for death, it becomes a quiet and powerful truth that these stories must be told. Padala’s smallest act of writing a letter becomes a political act of reclaiming stolen narratives.

Manong, Para
by Naomi Cruz

Jeepney phaseout stories are vital because they illuminate the deeply intersectional nature of the issue affecting not only those who rely on jeepneys for daily transport but also those who operate them as a means of survival. Naomi Cruz’s Manong, Para summarizes the critique of the jeepney modernization program, exposing how state-imposed solutions often fail to consider the lived realities of the very people they affect.

The short film captures the decades-long commitment of jeepney drivers who put their blood, sweat, and tears into acquiring and maintaining a single unit. For many, driving a jeepney is not just a job but a generation's livelihood, one that has managed to sustain families even through economic hardships and even the pandemic. Manong, Para positions the jeepney not just as a cultural icon but as a symbol of economic resilience.

The short film highlights the bureaucratic barriers drivers face, such as the costly and exclusive franchise system and the forced requirement of joining cooperatives, which disproportionately burden low-income drivers. While the idea of modernization has its surface-level appeal, Cruz challenges its selective logic, that is, it aims to reduce pollution, but jeepneys are not the main contributors of pollution or even traffic.

By addressing the realities of costly loans for modernized units and the added pressure of daily survival, Manong, Para critiques how modernization under capitalism becomes a tool that punishes the working class in the name of progress. The short film underlines how these “solutions” offer no uplift, but displacement, pushing drivers further into debt and insecurity. Cruz makes it clear that the jeepney phaseout is a political and personal issue that is entwined in human rights and state accountability.

Transients
by Kyla Romero

People often find themselves yearning to reconnect with past relationships, not always for reconciliation, but for the healing that memory and brief reconnection can bring, as even the shortest of moments, when shared meaningfully, leave behind an emotional imprint that lingers far beyond their actual duration. Kyla Romero’s Transients captures that sentimental yet deeply resonant nature of past encounters, ones that live on through memory and longing.

Transients is an ode to those sentimental fragments of time. The act of filmmaking becomes a mechanism as a way to preserve, reinterpret, and even reimagine those encounters. Justin’s desire to reconnect with Grace materializes first through a phone call and later, through a film that he wanted to recreate his memory from. The process reveals how cinema becomes an emotional archive, one that allows people to sculpt their most fragile moments into something lasting.

Romero frames the emotional weight of her characters through wide shots of Justin in isolation and later, of Justin and Grace together, removing the emotional distance and intimacy they once shared. The visual contrast between loneliness and happiness adds a layer to the short film’s tension, which is the awareness that some people aren’t meant to stay, even if they changed each other for the better.

Romero refuses to dramatize heartbreak but instead treats memory as an active space, one in which longing and gratitude can co-exist. She does not reduce the past to mere nostalgia, but also to find a deeper understanding of oneself.

Kaliwa
by Jade Oraa

The definition of development has continuously evolved, yet remains caught with contradictions, especially when it claims to be inclusive but leaves entire communities behind, or worse, uproots them in favor of progress. Jade Oraa’s Kaliwa offers a critique of such development, if it can truly be called development when it sacrifices the future of Indigenous people groups.

Through the voices of Makid-ata, Baikuran, and Dumagat-Remontado communities, Kaliwa reveals how these are not isolated struggles but part of systemic patterns. The short film shows that nature has sustained these IPs for generations, not just for provisions but culturally and spiritually. The land is not simply territory but a part of their identity. To displace them is to sever a sacred connection, amounting to injustice and cultural erasure.

The short film highlights how the proposed Kaliwa Dam project is a symbol of many state-sponsored “developments” that exemplify how that privileges the educated elite while silencing marginalized voices. The journey to Manila to protest is a sacrifice in itself as they leave their families behind and endure long travels all to demand recognition in decisions that will determine the future of their ancestral domains.

Oraa also draws attention to the structural violence embedded in national policies that routinely exclude IPs from participating in the grand scale of national development. The state’s failure to acknowledge their agency reinforces a false dichotomy that separates IPs from the Filipino people and as an integral part of the nation’s past, present, and future.

#BuhayElbi

Sikat na Si Kat
by Jo Israel

The desire to become a star is a dream shared by many, but the film industry commodifies this obsession at the expense of human dignity, leading to harmful practices. Jo Israel’s Sikat na Si Kat serves as a commentary on the absence of a structural safe space that should protect film workers, particularly actors, from exploitative and unsafe working conditions. Through the character of Lucca, as an aspiring actress cast in a heavy role as a drug addict, Israel exposes the industry’s negligence in providing a safe environment.

Lucca’s desperation is evident from the film’s outset. Her eagerness to prove herself in a cutthroat industry is manipulated, as she is left to internalize and embody a complex role without guidance or support from the production. The director’s insistence on “authenticity” without providing research support or psychological safety highlights the industry’s shallow approach to portraying serious issues. The burden falls entirely on Lucca, a reflection of how productions often prioritize artistic and commercial output over the well-being of their workers.

Israel’s critique is grounded in the need for systemic change, especially in light of the Eddie Garcia Law, which seeks to enforce safer working conditions in the Philippine film industry. Sikat na Si Kat doesn’t just illustrate the one actor’s suffering, but it gestures toward a collective failure, a culture that normalizes emotional manipulation, and the erasure of boundaries in the name of art. By centering the personal cost of chasing stardom, Israel offers a powerful call to recognize and dismantle the systems that dehumanize those who give so much of themselves to the craft.

Sa Mayo Ikaw ay Babalik
By Janelli Patangan

Student activism has long been misunderstood, often vilified as reckless or romanticized to the point of abstraction of these personal stories and experiences in the movement. Janelli Patangan’s Sa Mayo Ikaw ay Babalik approaches the subject matter through a quieter and intimate lens as a love story shaped and scarred by the revolution. Rather than offering a political narrative, it situates activism within the personal, exploring how ideals can both spark connection and cause separation. It is a story of two lovers, Dale and Argie, bound initially by their shared passion for the movement, only to be torn apart by the very cause that brought them together.

Film Still from *Sa Mayo Ikaw ay Babalik*

Patangan uses this struggle to complicate the binary of love and the revolution. Dale’s persistent questioning whether Argie ever regretted leaving echoes throughout the short film, answered not by Argie himself, but through imagined conversations and ghosts of him with his lingering memory. Argie’s unwavering response that he harbors no regret deepens the emotional conflict as the tragedy lies not in the act of leaving but in Dale’s reconciliation with what that choice meant for him. The grief that unfolds is not rooted in betrayal, but in understanding that both were acting out of love, albeit for different things. In this way, Patangan humanizes the struggle, showing that the revolution can be just as emotionally consuming as any romantic pursuit.

Sa Mayo Ikaw ay Babalik doesn’t attempt to resolve the tension between personal and political commitments but instead embraces the grief and tenderness in that tension, and as a reminder that to love, whether for a person or the masses, is always an act of struggle.

still waters
By Gabriel Nafura

Beneath the private stories from college students who study very far from home often lies a deeper and more painful one, rooted in the dysfunction of the very families they leave behind. Gabriel Nafura’s still waters captures this subtle narrative by focusing on the lives of students navigating personal trauma within the familiar and emotionally charged setting of UPLB. The decision to study far away is not simply just about academic ambition but also as an act of escape, and of reclaiming space from home that has grown oppressive.

The short film situates family dysfunction within the critique of how Filipino values, often tied to conformity and moral obligation, can manifest as emotional control. Vivian’s decision to study at UPLB, against her mother’s wishes, becomes an act of defiance. Yet this defiance is not without consequence, as she is vilified by her mother, revealing how parental love is a manifestation of authoritarianism in many Filipino households. This is a pattern of authoritarianism that extends into Vivian’s relationship with Seph, as, rather than seeing him as a person, she treats him as a means to an end, as a tenant to split the rent, a presence to tolerate, mirroring the same emotional invalidation she experienced at home. Seph, too, is burdened by parental rejection as his direction in life is dismissed much like Vivian’s was.

Nafura uncovers this toxic cycle as the trauma is absorbed within the family, as it leaks into every subsequent relationship. Home, which should be a safe haven, becomes an incubator of silence and resentment. The performances carry this emotional weight, emphasizing how these internalized struggles are often left unspoken but never unfelt.

In its already long runtime, still waters uses the space to draw out the corrosive dynamics of emotional control disguised as parental love and its ripple effect on identity and self-worth. Nafura suggests that societal reforms do not begin in institutions, but rather in homes. And when left unresolved, the cycle will continue to quietly shape generations to come.

Azazel
By Randy Q. Villanueva and Utes Salazar

Reimaginations of biblical figures often walk a fine line between liberation and repression as they offer new ways of understanding while also revealing the very ideologies that have long silenced difficult truths. Randy Q. Villanueva and Utes Salazar’s Azazel reinterprets the story of Azazel, the biblical scapegoat, becoming a metaphor for generational trauma and the weight of unatoned sins. Drawing from the figure of Azazel, cast out in the wilderness bearing the sins of the people, the short film recontextualizes it as a narrative through a mother who weaponizes her beliefs to justify, rather than confront, the damages she has caused.

Set within a modern contemporary Filipino context, Azazel uses its symbolisms to interrogate how patriarchy, religious conservatism, etc., intersect in one haunted matriarch. The mother’s demeanor is slowly revealed to be a veil for long-buried guilt, redirected onto her children. Her son, depicted as the embodiment of Azazel, is less a figure of rebellion than a reflection of her refusal to come to terms with the past. Not once does she ask for forgiveness, but instead her morals are defined by denial and emotional neglect. But rather than naming her wrongs, she folds them into martyrdom, casting herself as misunderstood and sanctified.

The short film choices of black and white cinematography, close-up shots, and claustrophobic blockings evoke the aesthetic of gothic horror and the existential rigor of Ingmar Bergman. These nods heighten the psychological tension, trapping the characters in a space that feels both sacred and suffocating.

Azazel is not an easy film, as it is emotionally claustrophobic, but in its exhaustion lies its power. The lack of catharsis mirrors the fate of the scapegoat as banished, burdened, and unresolved, as it offers no redemption. Instead, it renders a brutally honest portrait of how generational trauma festers when accountability is evaded, just like a mother who carries her sin not in search of atonement but as a burden she refuses to name.

Habang Gadugay
By Gab Carmelo

The uncertainty of whether a loved one will return home dead or alive presents an agonizing existential dilemma: if it is better to know they’re gone, or does clinging to hope only deepen the wound? Gab Carmelo’s Habang Gadugay transforms this limbo into a full-blown nightmare as it turns the fear of forgetting into a surreal, communal haunting. The short film captures the torment of those left behind by not just mourning the absence of bodies, but grappling with the slow erosion of memory that threatens to erase their loved ones. In this town, the dread is not only that the missing may never return, but that their names, their faces, and their stories will vanish with time and with them the people who still remember.

Carmelo’s fog-drenched setting becomes a metaphor for this emotional obscurity as it thickens and becomes more unrelenting, where the fog envelopes the town in a disorienting stillness, where reality and grief blur. The missing are not simply gone, but they reappear as unidentifiable spectral figures and faceless bodies, as if the grief of those left behind has reshaped their memory into something uncanny. The town’s shared trauma reflects the broader terror of unresolved loss, reminiscent of the long and painful pursuit of justice in cases of enforced disappearances. Like the cold silence of bureaucracy, the fog refuses clarity.

Habang Gadugay is resonant in its refusal to offer closure. Carmelo does not moralize or comfort, but instead the short film lingers in ambiguity in raising the harrowing question whether forgetting is an act of betrayal or a necessary cruelty. It not only becomes a medium for personal grief but on a collective responsibility of remembrance.

Pelikultura 2024: The Calabarzon Film Festival had its festival run last November 27-29, 2024, and was available for online streaming on JuanFlix last December 9-15, 2024.