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Dagitab
English Title: Sparks
Year of Release: 2014
Director & Screenwriter: Giancarlo Abrahan
Producers: Cinemalaya Foundation & Ten17P
Cast: Eula Valdez, Nonie Buencamino, Martin del Rosario, Sandino Martin, Max Eigenmann, Frances Ignacio, Ronnie Lazaro, Rolando Inocencio, Valentin Naguit, Misha Lecaros, Ryan Peter Judd, Whammy Alcazaren, Chris Gallegos, Al Bernard Garcia, Vic Robinson, Ness Roque, Jovita Laureola, Marvin Gomez
Issey and Jimmy, both academics, have been married long enough for their colleagues’ children to be in college. Jimmy takes rural field trips to finalize his dissertation on a folkloric muse, but he also asks about Lorena, a woman fighter who disappeared with no one able to pinpoint her whereabouts; a rebel commander who knows his and Lorena’s shared history tells him to give up his quest. Issey knows that Jimmy’s research is a contrivance—that he’s actually seeking closure with his old flame, who left him to join the insurgent army. Indulging in cigarettes and alcohol, she attends an out-of-town workshop as a facilitator, where her friend’s son Gab, avoiding his roommate’s same-sex advances, bonds with her. Although aware of the ethical complications, Issey’s disappointment in her marriage impels her to allow Gab’s interest to acquire erotic attributes.
Over a decade since its initial appearance, Dagitab found new life in a stage adaptation. The film itself had an ambivalent critical reception, as observable in the various critics organizations’ indicators of appreciation: set aside (except for performance trophies) by the oldest group, declared “best first film” by the late-millennium group, and wholly embraced by the newest (and only non-academic) group in its annual survey. One can immediately comprehend where the hesitation of older evaluators would arise from: the film grapples with the dynamics of a radical movement that abided for nearly half a century, that originated from personalities identified with the national university, and that continues to influence its constituents’ deliberations on policy and aesthetics. In this context, one might ascribe the film’s silence on the movement’s defining upheaval, a schism that led to the formation and eventual strengthening of breakaway groups, to the filmmaker’s possible youthfulness. Yet a closer tracking of the male professor’s obsession with a former lover, whose disappearance during active service in the people’s army may or may not have been a consequence of its tragically rampageous anti-infiltration campaign, raises the further issue, as expressed by the filmmaker, of the male character’s “mythopoliticizing” the woman’s disappearance, “because otherwise her ‘death’ would not have been as sublime as someone who loved her could hope for” (Facebook Messenger reply, October 24, 2025). And the fact that the rebel-army commander he queries refuses to provide him with a useful account (perhaps to own the woman’s narrative, or protect his own feelings for her) suggests the standard allegorizing of the nation, or at least an idealized aspect of it, being imposed again on the figure of the woman. Without attempting to spoil any first-time appreciator’s viewing experience, we can read further into the handling of the wife’s discontent using gender as a means of critique—i.e., between the two academic protagonists, she’s the one who gets laid in real life, and her stud, after enduring the male prof’s retaliatory attempt at intimidation, will still be able to hope for further sexual liberation. The use of sexual exclusion as a means of indicating where a storyteller’s sympathies lie is a narrative tactic closely associated with contemporary Euro-Latin material, but to see it deployed in Pinas culture, with its Euro-Latinate roots, is to realize how much potential still lies in pathways we might have too readily abandoned for the sake of Americanization.
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Sila-Sila
English Title: The Same People
Year of Release: 2019
Director: Giancarlo Abrahan
Screenwriter: Daniel Saniana
Producers: ABS-CBN Film Productions, Quiapo Collective, UP Cinema Arts Society
Cast: Gio Gahol, Topper Fabregas, Dwein Baltazar, Phi Palmost, Bart Guingona, Kych Minemoto, Vincent Kevin Pajara, Meann Espinosa, Jay Gonzaga, Sunshine Teodoro, Adrienne Vergara, Thea Marabut, Juan Miguel Severo, Lin Javier, Jasmine Curtis-Smith, Wilson Tenama, Rainier Carreon, Justin Hernandez, Maureen Gonzales, Daniel Morial, Daniel Saniana, Ilsa Malsi, Apa Agbayani, JL Javier, Marvin Matias, Gaye Angeles, Boo Gabunada
Gabriel and Jared, friends since college, are unable to recover from what Gab calls Jared’s betrayal when the former sees the latter’s flirtation on a dating app. He leaves the city to work at an interisland capital and returns after a couple of years to attend a college reunion. Goaded along by mutual friends, Gab attempts to resume communicating with Jared but his ex is still sore over his sudden departure and they wind up quarreling again. Matters get more complicated when Gab is promoted by the non-governmental organization where he works but the higher position happens to be a vacancy … back in the same distant place he fled to. He also entertains various degrees of entanglements with straight men, with Jared happening on the presence in his bedroom of a married man he’d been sleeping with and consequently having his own turn at a jealous fit.
After local culture had taken a womanly direction following the humiliating failure of the grand masculinist experiment of martial rule by Ferdinand Marcos Sr., filmmakers realized that they no longer had to resort to camp or negative imaging in order to present queer characters onscreen. The still-unsatisfactory positive characterization may have been intended to justify the espousal of same-sex intercourse—successful enough, despite reactionary gripes, to initiate postqueer storytelling in Philippine cinema. What might surprise observers still fixated on the premillennial valuations of dimorphic differentation and observance of socially designated gender roles is how, as exemplified in Sila-Sila, local queer subjects have assimilated Western best practice, possibly exceeding global models by enabling the rest of “straight” culture to arrive at a workable rapprochement with the community. The film in fact not only dispenses with the expected consummation of copulation scenes; it also casts a surprisingly critical perspective on Gab, its central character, who’s inclined to flee rather than confront conflicts (termed “ghosting” in social-media parlance, per a clarification on December 14, 2025, from the director via Facebook Messenger regarding the film’s misleading summary at the Internet Movie Database), engages in the promiscuity that he abhors in others, and insists on teasing cis-het males to the point where he succeeds in seducing a married man. SS’s feat lies in demonstrating the psychological motives behind Gab’s resistance to queer culture’s prescriptions, withholding moralist judgment while also indicating how his self-absorption becomes a source of frustration for people who genuinely love him. One might be invited to make correspondences between his long journey to self-understanding and the national condition of a young country that still seems incapable of maturation, but that might be a challenge better left to more appropriate social-science experts.
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