Final Rating: 4/5
At a high-end golf and country club near Manila, a 17-year-old girl named Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto) works as one of the newest “tee girls” on the driving range. Her job is as simple as it is demeaning: place golf balls on a tee for players on the range so they don’t have to do it themselves. Over the course of one day on the job, Isabel discovers some uncomfortable truths and dark edges hiding just below the surface of the manicured fairways.
Filipiñana is the debut feature film and brainchild of writer, director, editor, and co-producer Rafael Manuel, who expanded on his award-winning 24-minute short of the same name to create this film.
The opening shot of the film is the only scene we get outside of the country club. It takes place onboard a bus carrying a number of tourists from China through the city of Manila heading to the club. The local hostess and tour guide gives some basic local language lessons (including a funny translation for saying “Shit, it’s hot!”), before the bus is stopped by a rush of locals looking to fill up water jugs. The drought in the city immediately cuts onto the pristine green grass of the golf course, being watered by hundreds of sprinklers spread across every hole.
Stark inequality is a big theme throughout Filipiñana, which makes a high brow country club a perfect setting. Isabel and her fellow tee girls, clad in identical pastel blue dresses, sweat in the heat of the day while their supervisor sits inside with a television and an air conditioner nearby.
The all-female brigade of caddies caters to every need of the wealthy golfers, the majority of whom are men. The food the staff are offered is meager, while the club members and visiting tourists seem to barely touch extravagant spreads of posh cuisine.
The story mostly follows two main threads. Isabel is assigned to Dr. Palanca (Teroy Guzman) on the driving range, who is the country club’s president. He recognizes something about her, and in their small talk they discover they share a cultural history as Ilocano people from the Ilocos region of the Philippines.
We also follow Clara (Carmen Castellanos), a young woman with Filipino heritage visiting from New York where she goes to school. She is at the club with her uncle Renato (Carlos Siguion-Reyna), who is trying to convince her to move back to help be a voice for change within the country.
The film has a stunning visual sense to it, owing to cinematographer Xenia Patricia’s patient camera and keen sense of space. She frames the absurdity of the expensive empty spaces of the club in a way that heightens the satire and thematic elements of class divide. When on the golf course, the mostly static shots work to show different perspectives and depths of space: looking straight down a fairway, perpendicular across multiple holes, looking straight down from a mango tree, framing a dying birch tree amongst the lush green.
As Isabel wanders further away from her post at the driving range and Clara gets further into her round of golf, they both start to see the cracks in the club’s façade. There is a violence inherent in the structure of the golf club, which historically really came to places like the Philippines through colonial influences and foreign military presence.
Those with money, power, and title enjoy their comforts and desires while enticing wealthy visiting tourists with an exotic vacation. They’re oblivious to the damage that can be done and the lower classes of people that are left behind and forgotten.
Filipiñana exists in the kind of dark, satirical space that a film like Triangle of Sadness does. It is a more meditative experience, and Manuel is not afraid to let his scenes linger like the oppressive, ever-present heat of the day.
By the end, it takes a more haunting, dramatic turn that leaves viewers with a lot to think about. Without revealing any details, the stunned silence of the CIFF audience during the film’s final scene and end credits is something that isn’t easily forgotten.
Filipiñana was seen during the 2026 Calgary International Film Festival.
