Displaying an extraordinary command of his surreal and unnerving visual language, first-time filmmaker Rafael Manuel adapts his award-winning 2020 short film of the same name to chilling effect. Manuel plumbs the depths of Filipino identity and national consciousness to uncover ominous fragments and cracks that defy picture-perfect unity. Through a stylized, colorful approach lensed with care and precision by cinematographer Xenia Patricia, Manuel takes us into a world where violence and control are exerted with the subtle flick of a wrist or tip of a hat. Painting a scathing portrait of class disparities and post-colonial power structures in ways that are both quiet and unsettling, Filipiñana announces the arrival of an accomplished writer-director who unflinchingly confronts his country’s past, present, and future.

"A great film can be recognized from its first shot, and that’s how it is with Filipiñana, which grabbed me from the very beginning, announcing itself as a masterwork... Its scenes are finely composed and precisely staged yet fluidly energetic. They are exemplary in their sensory beauty, in the delicately understated emotions that they embody, in the world that they conjure, in the analytical insight that they unfold. With Filipiñana, Manuel opens new vistas in the future of the cinema." – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“A rich, densely cinematic film, it is a stunning assured debut from young Filipino filmmaker Rafael Manuel... A film that should be seen in cinemas.” – C.J. Prince, The Film Stage

“Darkly comic, visually inventive...cinematically builds into a scathing account of inequality.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter