Madonna of the Revolution

Lakambini [Noblewoman]
Directed by Arjanmar H. Rebeta
Written by Rody Vera

The biggest still-to-be-resolved controversy about the Philippines’s anticolonial revolution, the first in Asia, centers on the status of Andrés Bonifacio, founder of its liberation army, the Katipunan. Most adequately schooled natives would be aware that recognition of his stature as head of the country’s liberated territories was wrested by a faction that derided his status as uneducated and low-born, despite overwhelming evidence that he’d attained higher levels of historical and political awareness, a result of persistent self-education, than his critics. As a result of duplicitous maneuvering, he and his brother were subjected to a mock trial and summarily executed, their bodies never found despite an arduous month-long search covering two mountains by his widow, Gregoria de Jesús.

11011Also known as Oryang, de Jesus specified Lakambini as her nom de guerre, in acknowledgment of her husband’s position as Lakan or ruler. She accused agents of the usurpation forces of rape and was warned that she could be targeted for assassination. Julio Nakpil, one of her late husband’s lieutenants, married her and kept her safe, enabling her to survive nearly half a century after Bonifacio’s death. A lesser-known fact is that Bonifacio had appointed her his Vice President, which would have made her his successor if the revolution had not been betrayed by Emilio Aguinaldo.

11011Oryang not surprisingly lived out the rest of her life as a traumatized and oppressed figure, although she drew enough inspiration from her years of struggle to be able to codify the lessons she picked up. The challenge for anyone attempting to accomplish a feature film about her would be manifold enough to discourage profit-oriented entities such as the Metro Manila Film Festival, which refused to provide financing for Lakambini (not the only prestige project it turned down in a long history of more questionable entries than memorable ones). Aside from the whopping budgetary requirement of recreating scenes over a century in the past, an extensive millennial-era release had also tackled the same biographical narrative – Lav Diaz’s eight-hour Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis (2016).

11011As if these travails weren’t enough, the Lakambini project suffered from scheduling complications as well as a surfeit of newly uncovered information and insights provided by contemporary historical developments, duly documented by the production team. The feature was initially meant to be a joint project of Jeffrey Jeturian and Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil, with the latter eventually deciding to assume creative producer functions. The final film credits Arjanmar H. Rebeta as director, but also makes use of the aforementioned interview materials as well as subsequent footage where a new actor, Elora Españo, replaced Lovi Poe; still one more actor, Gina Pareño, portrayed Oryang as an elderly citizen.

11011To be sure, the use of multiple actors to portray the same character had already been attempted in earlier films, notably in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), Luis Buñuel’s well-received last film. But where Buñuel’s purpose was to illustrate the central male character’s shifting perceptions, Lakambini’s turn (as articulated in the film by its director) serves to impress on the viewer the possibility of Oryang representing not one fixed type, but the fuller array of Philippine womanhood. The film’s purpose is further heightened by the actors’ capabilities, with Pareño, an entire cluster of her own share of well-publicized trauma and triumph behind her, ushering the text’s literal mergence of fiction and fact in a remarkable final sequence that will be permanently imprinted on the memory of anyone who watches it.

11011The only possible hesitation for most audiences, apart from the film’s formal novelty, would be the unremitting sadness of Oryang’s story: not only was she, like the revolution, violated by the very people expected to support her cause, she also lived through all three periods of vicious colonization, dying during World War II before the country attained any form of liberation. She allows herself some consolation in hearing the news of the failure of the fraudulent president’s attempt to legitimize his bloody power-grab via national elections, but issues perhaps the most important historical principle ever made by any Philippine political entity: that history, in its own time, will unmask hidden iniquity (preceding by a few decades Martin Luther King’s much-quoted statement on the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice).

11011Yet the filmmakers involved in the project had been capable in the past of creating difficult reflexive material with light-handed, even comic applications.[1] The daring with which they packaged the narrative of Gregoria de Jesús has not only accurately represented her as a polysemic figure, capable of addressing folks from several generations and persuasions and possibly even nationalities; it has also made her recognizable to millennial audiences, with their preference for experiencing multimedia banter and tolerance for crisscrossing various levels of reality. Lakambini has enabled her to step into the here and now, and the pleasant surprise is that her messages continue to resonate.

Note

Previously published July 27, 2025, in The FilAm. Non-essential disclosures: I was present during the feature film’s first day of shooting, intending to occasionally attend in order to observe a post-celluloid production, since the technological transition to digital occurred while I was busy writing my doctoral dissertation. I was also chair of the board of jurors during the short film festival where Arjanmar H. Rebeta’s entry (see note below) won several prizes. Finally, before production started, I wrote “Theater, Film, & Everything In-Between,” effectively an introduction to Two Women as Specters of History: Lakambini and Indigo Child by Rody Vera (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2019), the annotated and translated screenplays of two prizewinning films; the book, also a prizewinner, was edited by Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil.

[1] Each of the names who directorially participated had works that may be classified as reflexive but in differing respects: Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil’s last completed film, Indigo Child (2016), was a documentation of a restaged play; Arjanmar H. Rebeta’s previous work, “Libro for Ransom” (2023), was a short film on an investigative journalist’s pursuit of the truth behind the disappearance and recovery of the novels of José Rizal in 1961. Jeffrey Jeturian had two titles, Tuhog (Larger than Life, 2001) and Bikini Open (2005), the first a tracking of the process of the adaptation of a rape case for a commercial film project and the second a mockumentary on a beauty contest.

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