The first human voices one hears in Rafael Manuel’s Filipiñana is a collective whoa!—the sound a bus full of tourists makes when their coach suddenly brakes to avoid peril on a busy, color-saturated Manila street. The group of Chinese visitors on board will soon make their way from the sweltering yet drought-stricken city to a local golf resort, lush with abundantly watered greens.
The second major work this year to center the class struggle on the grounds of a country club—season 2 of Beef premiered in April 2026—Filipiñana eschews the performance and narrative contrivances of the former for something quieter and more sinister in affect. Meticulous in sound design and choreography, with a rich visual formality that gives fresh meaning to the term “sunshine noir,” a deliberate and inevitable sense of torpor overwhelms the film’s mise en scène.
The connection between golf and heat is inaction, which is one of the biggest themes of this film. Golf is a game of inaction, in that the person who takes the least amount of strokes is the person who wins. When you think about a lot of the problems my country is facing—not just my country, but maybe the world at large—a lot of them are rooted in inaction. — Rafael Manuel
Focusing on the immediate concerns of two young women whose paths may cross without direct or meaningful interaction, the film references themes of colonialism, tribalism, and Western Orientalism in subtle detail. Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto) is a seventeen-year-old “tee-girl”—she places fresh balls on the tees as golfers take practice shots on the driving range—enduring the come-ons of the customers who make her job possible. Clara (Carmen Castellanos), a Filipino-American visiting from New York, is a study in lethargy and indecision as she fends off multiple entreaties by Renato (Carlitos Siguion-Reyna)—her uncle and owner of the club—to rejoin her family and take over the resort’s operation. Whether or not one or both of them can ever escape this sea of conformity is an open question, but wait for the final scene, which plays out under the closing credits.
Filipiñana is now in theaters. See info and links below for details.
FILIPIÑANA
Written and directed by Rafael Manual
Monica Film Center
1332 2nd Street, downtown Santa Monica
laemmle.com/monica-film-center
Laemmle Glendale
207 North Maryland Avenue, downtown Glendale
Film Forum
209 West Houston Street, New York City
Siskel Film Center
164 North State Street, downtown Chicago
siskelfilmcenter.org/filipinana
Rafael Manuel quotation from Noah Kulwin, “A Game of Inaction: A Conversation with Filipiñana director Rafael Manuel,” Screen Slate, August 25, 2026.
screenslate.com/conversation-filipinana-director-rafael-manuel
Rafael Manual, Filipiñana (2026). Jorrybell Agoto (from top, photos 1, 2 (seated), and 9; Carmen Castellanos (3 and 6); Carlitos Siguion-Reyna (3).
Stills and Filipiñana poster courtesy and © Kino Lorber.
