LOS ANGELES – “When I saw this film a couple of months ago, I was just in awe.”
Award-winning filmmaker Sean Baker began his introduction of “Filipiñana,” the Philippines’ entry to the 99th Academy Awards’ Best International Feature race, and its director, Rafael Manuel, in a recent screening for Oscar voters at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills.
Baker, the 2025 Oscar Best Director winner for “Anora,” continued, “From the first image, I really feel that in many ways, it (Filipiñana) is a masterclass in deadpan political satire. I consider the craft impeccable on every level.
“And the film has so much to say. I love the way that it allows you as an audience member to participate and perhaps bring your own politics to it. I’m very excited to dive into it today.
“But one more thing to say, to think that this is a first-time feature filmmaker. This is really very pretty damn impressive.”
With that glowing praise from the director also noted for “The Florida Project,” “Red Rocket” and “Tangerine,” Baker launched his post-screening conversation with Manuel, who is in town for the start of his film’s Oscars campaign.
Only 36, the Manila-born Manuel studied philosophy and visual communications and graduated with honors at the Ateneo de Manila University. He earned his MA (valedictorian) in filmmaking at the London Film School.
‘Filipiñana’ exposes class divide, corruption
After Baker and Manuel’s engaging conversation, I sat down in the theater with the latter, a long-haired, well-spoken man, about “Filipiñana,” which I saw for the first time that recent morning.
I concur with Baker. “Filipiñana,” which won the World Cinema Dramatic Jury Award at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, is indeed a pretty damn impressive feature directing debut. Executive produced by revered filmmaker Zhangke Jia, the social satire is a deliberately paced, subtly biting commentary on class division, regionalism, patriarchy and colonialism.
Manuel, who also wrote the screenplay laced with humor, mines a golf course as a setting to depict exploitation, corruption and the huge disparity between rich and poor in the Philippines.
The dark comedy is also rife with visual metaphors, including the legs-spread angle of the wealthy male golfers as the tee girls crouch below and people with pails scrambling to get water from a truck (Manuel’s winking nod to poverty porn, some critics’ favorite), while numerous water sprinkles pamper the lush grass on a golf course.
The lead character, Isabel (a compelling Jorrybell Agoto, who reminds me of the late great Nora Aunor), an Ilocana working at the golf course, eats and savors a mango on the sly, evoking a primal and sensual moment.
Manuel has astute observations on life in the Philippines. A golf course staffer asks a colleague about the wife of the golf course owner, “Di ba dating Miss Universe yan?” A nod to the Filipinos’ obsession with beauty pageants.
When Clara (Carmen Castellanos), the U.S. based niece of Renato (Carlos Siguion Reyna), an elite golf club member, asks her caddy (Isabel Sicat) if she should move back to the Philippines, the latter answers no because “You will brown here.”
Manuel on Baker’s praise, Filipino influences
“Very surreal, very unreal,” Manuel described just having a Q and A with Baker, whose questions further reflected his admiration for “Filipiñana” and Philippine cinema.
“But for me, it’s a really good example of the kind of community that we need in the Philippines – filmmakers championing other filmmakers, especially filmmakers that have gotten success and really trying to leave the door open to other filmmakers. And I feel like in the Philippines, we need more of that.”
Manuel himself adores Baker’s films. “I’ve seen all of them,” he said. “I love his work, which makes it even more surreal that he reached out and expressed how much he loved ‘Filipiñana.’ But my favorite Sean Baker film – that’s a really hard one. I would say it would be between maybe ‘The Florida Project’ and ‘Red Rocket.’ I love ‘Red Rocket.’ ”
It all began when Baker posted an Instagram story with “Filipiñana” clips and raved, “This film is amazing.”
“Even now, I still haven’t processed it,” Manuel recounted his reaction to Baker’s spontaneous endorsement. “It’s very surreal. I shared it with my team as soon as he posted that. Because it’s very much a team effort. Like him saying that this is amazing. It’s a reflection of all the hard work that my team put into the film because it takes a village to make a film.”
Manuel credited Filipino masters, including Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, Mike de Leon and Lav Diaz, as “very influential. Whether it’s indirectly or directly, the social consciousness of the films of Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal. Film is a form of resistance. It’s always going to be built into me because of watching their films as I was growing up.
“Lav Diaz is a form of resistance through the slowness of his pacing. The slowness of his cinema is something I very much aspire to as well. Just the uncompromising principles that he has.
“And I would also like to mention Kidlat Tahimik, another big Filipino influence of mine. When I first saw ‘Perfumed Nightmare,’ it really just opened my eyes and ears to what cinema could be.”
Philippine cinema has gained another auteur and an exponent of an art house genre that eschews fast-paced storytelling. Manuel, who also edited his film, pointed out, “Slow cinema as a form of resistance to the modernizing gaze and how everything now is just moving faster is a really big reference point for me. I think my films definitely are not as slow as Lav Diaz’s.
“I feel like the sad truth of the matter is that Lav Diaz is such a talented genius but hardly anyone watches his films in the Philippines. A lot of Europeans, a lot of Americans watch his films but a lot of Filipinos haven’t seen the beauty of Lav Diaz films.
“And that talks to the lack of distribution in the Philippines. So what I’m hoping is to have his (Diaz’s) principles of anti-Hollywood slow resistance and build into the cinema but to make it more accessible for a wider audience.”
The labor and social strata tension underneath posh golf courses is a milieu that Manuel knows very well. The director’s father, who inspired the Dr. Palanca character (Teroy Guzman), was the president of a country club while his parents owned Gold Depot, a golf equipment company. As the creative dictum goes, write what you know.
“I think very much so,” Manuel agreed. “Like I always knew that I wanted to make a film about a golf course because it was the world that my parents introduced me to when I was very young.
“And it was always a world that I found absurd but it was only when I started growing up a bit more, moving away from my family home, that I started to pick up more of the nuance of what exactly I found absurd about the world.
“Filipino father-son relationships are very complicated – there’s a lot of love there, for sure, but you don’t talk so much. So this is my way of talking to him, of speaking to him. So I also hope it comes across as a letter to my father. But a letter written with love.”
“No, he still hasn’t,” Manuel confirmed that his dad hasn’t seen “Filipiñana” but his mother has watched it. “It was just really sad because he was going to watch the premiere in the Philippines but a couple of days before that, he got into a bad accident. He injured his leg. So on the premiere, he couldn’t make it. I’m still hopeful he’ll get to see the film.”
Jorybell Agoto’s fight with lymphoma
Told that Agoto reminded me of the late great Nora Aunor and that her eyes, like Aunor’s, are expressive, Manuel emphasized. “Very, very.”
Agoto also starred in the original short film version, which cinched the 2020 Silver Berlin Bear. He expanded the short into the feature, also titled “Filipiñana.”
Manuel recounted meeting the actress for the first time. “When I was casting for the short, I just did open casting. She was literally one of the last girls to walk in. What drew me to Jorrybell was when she first walked into the room, she didn’t make an immediate strong impression on me.
“But the more time I spent with her, the more her presence grew. And I thought, that’s Isabel’s character to a T – at first, to be a bit invisible. But the more time an audience spends with her, her eyes, like you said – they really grow on you.
“And it’s really sad because, as I mentioned (in the Q and A), right now, she’s really unwell. So really, every time that I have a Q and A on the film, I really hope everyone’s thoughts and prayers are with her and that she fights her sickness right now.”
In the Q and A, Baker also praised the actress, saying, “She’s wonderful in this film.” To which Manuel said, “When she did the short film six or seven years ago, it was her first time acting but since then, she has become an indie darling.”
When Baker asked Manuel if he discovered Agoto, he diplomatically answered with a smile, “We discovered each other.”
Manuel stressed to the screening audience, “But I also really want you guys to keep her in your thoughts and prayers because she’s in the critical care unit right now. She has lymphoma.
“So if you guys could please pray for her. We’re really trying to send her as much love and energy as we can. It’s really hard for me as well because I can’t be there with her because we’re here traveling with the film. But she’s fighting. She’s young.”
When Baker inquired if Agoto graced the film’s Sundance premiere, Manuel shared, “No, because the U.S. government refused to give her a visa.
“It’s really tragic but also, at the same time, when she told me about the visa interview, they asked her, so what do you do for a living? She was like, panicking. I think it’s the first time she ever went to apply for a visa. She’s like, I’m a freelance art actress. And I was like, no, why did you say freelance?”
Oscars campaign
“Very tiring, for sure,” he said of the Oscars campaign. “Filipiñana,” which recently became the first Philippine film to score a Best International Feature nod at the Gotham Awards, has a shot at becoming the first Filipino movie to be shortlisted in the Academy’s International Race derby.
“We’ve been touring with the film since our premiere in January. What is really fueling me is knowing that there’s a huge support system behind the film.
“I didn’t make the film by myself. We were a huge team making this and we’re all rooting for the film to go as far as it can because we all believe in the film. That’s what gives me the energy – the fact that that were so many people behind this film, that own and believe in this film.”
On “Filipiñana” crew’s international mix, which includes cinematographer Xenia Patricia and production and costume designer Tatjana Honegger, Manuel explained, “Because I went to film school abroad. So a lot of the crew members, the heads of departments, are my classmates.
“It was very important to me because my consciousness as a filmmaker really grew when I went to film school in London. A lot of these people responsible for my consciousness are filmmakers.
“They’re the people that, if I had a band, would be my band members. It’s really important to water your own garden and to grow with the people that you know.”
Manuel, who now lives in Amsterdam, did have bands in Manila. He plays guitar and bass and composes songs. “I compose a lot,” he shared.
With Manuel’s stunning, assured debut, I can’t wait for his next films. “There are a few films that I’m working on now,” he shared. “The one that’s exciting me the most so far is this one film that I’m trying to find the right time to write in between all the Q and As and the traveling. It’s a period piece in the Philippines, set between the Spanish-American and colonial American periods.”
Ruben V. Nepales is an LA-based journalist whose honors include nine first prizes from the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards and the Los Angeles Press Club’s Southern California Journalism Awards. He authored “Through a Writer’s Lens,” which won first prize in nonfiction at the 2020-2021 National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards. In 2004, he became the first Filipino voter of the Golden Globe Awards. He is a member of the Golden Globe Foundation, one of Hollywood’s biggest philanthropic organizations.
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