BLITZ REVIEW - Juaniyo Arcellana - The Philippine Star
August 23, 2026 | 12:00am
Twenty-two editions later, the Cinemalaya film festival is still pushing the envelope for independent local cinema, despite the weather being uncooperative as usual and rains, floods turning the metropolis into a muddy, not-so-virtual waterworld.
It has come a long way, no doubt, from the maiden jury prize winner “Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros” in 2005, which went on to reap international fame and awards for its director Aureaus Solito (a.k.a. Kanakan Balintagos) and stamped in memory the performance of supporting patriarch Soliman Cruz (a.k.a. Mokyo of Batibot), which in the festival’s first year at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) left the audience wondering about the further possibilities of dirty realism.
Long since vacating the CCP premises due to ongoing, prolonged renovation, the festival continues to draw cinephiles and the plain curious in different venues across the city in select malls that provide ample shelter from the monsoon.
On the last day of this year’s run, I was able to catch two of the big winners, or at least the most talked-about films of the nine entries:
“Mag-iina” or the Mothering which won Best Picture and Best Director for Giancarlo Abrahan, and “2 Valid IDs” which rightfully copped the audience choice and jury prize, chronicling as it does the everywoman’s travails in the mad bureaucratic system found only in the Philippines.
It’s not every day that you come across a film like “Mag-iina,” surely one of a kind even by local standards. Some critics remarked that difficult as it was to grasp its post-surreal, post-structuralist mode, somewhat vaguely described in the teasers as a “psychological horror” complete with instantaneous possession and a seething matriarchy courtesy of melting wax prosthetics, the film was a cut or two above the rest.
The three generations of women inhabiting a decaying rundown house in their intertwined fates that drew in an adopted boy and a groped house help beleaguered by her surroundings, “Mag-iina” is quite a brave foray into a world run by women, visually compelling with narrative twists lurking around every corner, always at the risk of perhaps sounding misogynous.
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