REVIEW BY ZEEN MAGAZINE

Cinemalaya 2026 feels especially interested in the things Filipinos are forced to do just to get by: prove who we are, survive our families, negotiate power, or simply find someone who will love us back. Across these five films out of 9 entries that we saw, the Philippines is less a backdrop than a pressure cooker. Here’s our take, through a Gen Zeen lens but without pretending every movie needs to speak in hashtags.

2 Valid IDs — ★★★★☆

There is something almost absurd about being asked for two valid IDs when you do not even have one. That absurdity is exactly where 2 Valid IDs finds its bite.

Ma-an Asuncion-Dagñalan’s social drama follows Sylvia, a poor farmer played by Marietta Subong, who needs to claim a remittance sent for her husband Ramon’s medical treatment. The catch: the remittance center requires two valid IDs, and Sylvia has none. What follows is a bureaucratic nightmare involving queues, fixers, dwindling money, hunger and a husband whose condition is getting worse. The premise sounds almost too simple. That is precisely why it works.

We thought Subong tempered the rather talky script instead of allowing it to overwhelm her. Her restraint is powerful. The film repeats the “two valid IDs” problem quite a lot, sometimes to the point of frustration, but there is something intentionally maddening about hearing the same impossible requirement over and over. Sylvia is trapped in a loop, and eventually, so are we.

Meryll Soriano, a two-time Cinemalaya Best Actress, also reminds us that being a major award-winning performer does not mean you always have to be the center of the frame. Her comic timing, banter and little bits of chaos give the film much-needed oxygen. Joey Marquez, meanwhile, looks genuinely ill, and his understated exchanges with Subong communicate the tenderness between Sylvia and Ramon without turning their relationship into melodrama. Zaijian Jaranilla rounds out the principal cast.  

Dagñalan’s biggest strength is control. She doesn’t make the film visually louder than its material requires. Instead, she takes us into the world of people we rarely see represented with this much patience: ordinary Filipinos trying to complete ordinary tasks in a system designed as though everyone already has money, transportation, documents, time and energy.

And that is the horror of 2 Valid IDs: Sylvia does not want anything extraordinary. She wants money that was already sent to her. She needs it because her husband is sick. She wants to survive. Yet the system keeps asking her to prove that she deserves to.

Dagñalan, who previously won Cinemalaya Best Director for Blue Room, has a steady hand here. Her film is ultimately less about IDs than about how bureaucracy can turn poverty into a crime scene.  

The joke is that Sylvia needs two valid IDs to prove she exists. But after everything she goes through, you wonder why the system needed proof in the first place.

Mag-iina — ★★☆☆☆

Mag-iina has almost everything you would want from a Filipino family horror film: an ancestral house, three generations of women, unresolved grief, secrets, madness, ghosts and the kind of family history that probably should have stayed buried.

Directed by Giancarlo Abrahan and written by Guelan Varela-Luarca, the film follows Anj, who returns to her ancestral home after 21 years in New York to mourn her estranged father’s death. As the 40th day of his passing approaches, she finds herself surrounded by her mother, aunt, a maid and a young stranger boy as grief and something much darker begin to consume the house.  

Janine Gutierrez, Jackie Lou Blanco, Agot Isidro, Cherry Pie Picache, Ness Roque and Lucas Andalio give committed performances. There is no question that the actors understand the assignment. They deliver the poetry in Luarca’s dialogue with conviction, and there are scenes where the performances are genuinely delicious.

But the problem is that they don’t always feel like they belong to the same movie.

There are moments when Mag-iina feels like an intimate family drama, others where it becomes gothic horror, and still others where it seems determined to become a philosophical meditation on inherited trauma. None of those approaches are bad individually. The issue is the stitching.

The film is poetic, sometimes beautifully so. But poetry can become a little too aware of its own poetry. The dialogue is juicy, the performances are big, and the house practically begs to be photographed, yet the film occasionally feels like it is announcing its own profundity.

We kept waiting for Mag-iina to commit. Do you want to scare us? Then scare us. Do you want to make us sit with the complicated ways women inherit grief, violence and madness? Then sit with us.

The film wants both, but sometimes the two modes fight instead of feeding each other.

Abrahan is hardly an inexperienced filmmaker. His Dagitab won Best Director and Best Screenplay at Cinemalaya in 2014, while his Paki and Sila-sila also earned major Cinema One honors. Mag-iina is adapted from Luarca’s play Corridors, which perhaps explains some of its theatrical DNA.  

There is a genuinely interesting film hiding inside this one. We just wish it had stopped trying so hard to prove that it was there.

A.ni.mál — ★★★★★

Definitely one of our favorite entries this year.

A.ni.mál is a black comedy and social satire about Lily, the mayor’s daughter, who returns to a provincial Philippine town carrying a compromising video of the governor abusing his dog. Her father wants to protect his powerful friend, while her mother sees the scandal as an opportunity. Lily threatens to release the video unless the governor gives her the dog.

 It sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. And that is exactly the point. Dustin Celestino’s film is satire that understands something deeply uncomfortable about political corruption: sometimes evil is not sophisticated. Sometimes it is embarrassingly petty.

The film’s biggest weapon is its dialogue. People talk, manipulate, posture, rationalize and lie with such conviction that the comedy becomes increasingly disturbing. Everyone has a justification. Everyone has a performance. Everyone thinks they are the smartest person in the room.

Maxine Ignacio is a revelation as Lily, the conceited, hyper-aware, supposedly progressive nepo baby whose animal-rights advocacy exists in a wonderfully warped relationship with her privilege. Her performance is raw, funny and genuinely unhinged. She has the kind of energy that makes you think of someone you have absolutely encountered at a party or in school and immediately regretted making eye contact with.

Frances Makil-Ignacio, Bituin Escalante, Jojit Lorenzo, Reymund Domingo and Anthony Falcon complete the wonderfully dysfunctional ensemble. Celestino puts them together like an orchestra conductor, allowing each character’s particular brand of narcissism, cowardice or delusion to collide with the others.  

What we particularly loved is that Celestino does not stand in front of the movie holding a giant sign saying CORRUPTION IS BAD, because we already know it is.

He lets these people be people. And somehow, that makes them scarier. The director has described the film’s evil as banal, petty and ordinary rather than the grand, almost glamorous evil we often see in political stories. That idea comes through beautifully. These aren’t supervillains. They’re mediocre people who have accumulated enough power to make their mediocrity everyone else’s problem.  

A.ni.mál also refuses to give us the easy satisfaction of simply hating its characters from a safe distance. We recognize the psychology behind them. We understand the mechanisms. We see how entitlement, family loyalty, money and self-preservation become excuses.

But understanding them does not mean forgiving them. And that’s where the film gets its teeth.

It is entertaining, maddening and occasionally horrifying. More importantly, it asks us to examine the different disguises we wear as animals trying to survive in this particular jungle called the Philippines.

Status: Rejected — ★★★★★

Charming. Heartfelt. Hilarious in places. Then suddenly heartbreaking. 

Status: Rejected is the kind of movie that sneaks up on you.

Ruby Ruiz plays Biring, a 69-year-old grandmother whose U.S. visa application has been rejected yet again. Her dream is to reunite with her son in America, but when the traditional route fails, her loved ones suggest a decidedly modern Plan B: finding an AFAM through online dating. 

 It is a premise that could have easily become a cheap joke about an older Filipina trying to find a foreign husband.

Thankfully, Vahn Leinard Pascual has something more generous in mind. 

Ruiz is the centerpiece, and she is terrific. She moves effortlessly from the comedy of disastrous U.S. visa interviews, to the awkwardness of learning how Facebook and online flirting work, to moments of surprising sexual frankness, including the film’s risque masturbation sequence. But the performance never reduces Biring to a punchline.

That is what makes the film hurt. Biring isn’t simply looking for America. She is looking for a life that still feels possible.

Pascual’s film is about loneliness, but not only loneliness. It is about the Filipino American dream that refuses to die, even when the person dreaming it is already 69. It is about the strange ways technology gives lonely people new opportunities to connect and new opportunities to embarrass themselves.

Alessandra de Rossi, Beverly Salviejo and Yani Villarosa support Ruiz as the people orbiting Biring’s increasingly complicated search for love.  

What makes the film especially impressive is that Pascual doesn’t seem desperate to tell us what to think. His own statement describes the movie as a love letter to his grandmother and to Filipino grandmothers whose lives have been shaped by children leaving home, dreams being postponed and the quiet feeling of becoming invisible.   And you can feel that affection.

Pascual is making his feature directorial debut here, and there is something exciting about watching a young filmmaker trust his lead actor enough to let a character be messy, horny, funny, lonely, stubborn and hopeful all at once.  

Status: Rejected doesn’t try to lecture us about loneliness, the Filipino obsession with America or the lengths people will go to find love.

It just lets Biring live through it. And honestly? We could watch this one again and again.

Tayo Lang ang Nakakaalam — ★★★☆☆ 

Nobody’s really talking about HIV in the Philippines anymore. So Cinemalaya made sure we would be talking about it again.

David Corpuz’s Tayo Lang ang Nakakaalam takes us back to 2010s, where a young gay couple is forced to confront the physical and emotional agony of illness, grief and the fear of being found out. Neil’s partner Bong is fighting for his life against HIV, while the people around them struggle to understand what is actually happening.

The film’s greatest success is how it puts us inside the hospital ward, in Bong’s home and the “burol”.

Corpuz doesn’t immediately give us all the answers. We listen to conversations. We watch family members worry. We catch fragments of what they are saying. We know Bong is seriously ill, but the truth of his illness seems to sit in the room like something everyone is afraid to name. We heard the screams of pain from Bong, the panic from the family, and all the agonizing testimonies during the eulogy.

That makes the film feel less like a conventional HIV drama and more like being a witness to a family dealing with something they don’t fully know how to talk about.

Martin del Rosario carries much of the film’s emotional weight. His performance gives Neil a quiet desperation that never feels performative. Yayo Aguila is equally affecting as the mother who has accepted her son’s relationship with another man but struggles to extend that same acceptance to the fact that he has HIV, and that the couple kept it from her.

There is something important about Tayo Lang ang Nakakaalam choosing to revisit a subject that Philippine cinema and popular culture have largely stopped talking about. HIV stigma has not disappeared simply because treatment has improved.

But this is also where we found the film conflicted.

For most of its runtime, the film makes us sit with the fear, secrecy, illness and grief surrounding HIV. The emotional experience is heavy, and deliberately so. Then, almost at the very end, Neil gets tested and speaks with an HIV counselor, finally receiving the explanation and education that reframes everything we have just watched.

The information is important. In fact, we wish there had been more of it.

The problem is timing. The film spends almost its entire running time showing us HIV through the lens of tragedy, only to introduce the possibility of knowledge, treatment and survival in the final minutes of the reel. By then, the emotional narrative has already done its work. For much of the movie, HIV is something frightening, mysterious and devastating. The film eventually tells us that there is more to the story, but it arrives almost as an afterthought.

And that matters because Tayo Lang ang Nakakaalam has the opportunity to do something bigger than simply depict the stigma surrounding HIV. It could have shown us how stigma is created in the first place: through misinformation, silence and the absence of proper education.

Neil’s conversation with the HIV counselor is arguably the movie’s most important sequence because, suddenly, the fear has context. The unknown becomes something that can be tested, explained and understood.

We just wish Corpuz had trusted that idea enough to bring it into the movie earlier.

The film is brave for bringing HIV back into the conversation, particularly in a country where public discord around it can still be uncomfortable. Martin del Rosario and Yayo Aguila give the material the emotional force it needs, and Corpuz succeeds in making us feel like silent witnesses inside that hospital ward and their home.

But if the film wants us to leave with more than grief, if it wants us to understand that HIV is not simply a death sentence, and that modern medicine has changed what living with HIV can look like, the education cannot arrive only after the tragedy has already happened.

Tayo Lang ang Nakakaalam reminds us that silence can be deadly. We only wish it had given knowledge a little more screen time.

The Cinemalaya 2026 verdict so far

If these five films say anything about this year’s festival, it’s that Filipino independent cinema is still at its best when it stops trying to make characters represent an issue and simply lets them exist inside one.

2 Valid IDs makes bureaucracy personal.

Mag-iina turns family history into a haunted house.

A.ni.mál makes corruption hilariously pathetic.

Status: Rejected gives an older woman the right to want something for herself.

And Tayo Lang ang Nakakaalam reminds us of something we may have stopped talking about: HIV is still part of the Filipino story, and the conversation around it cannot end with fear.

Maybe that’s the most Gen Z thing about all five: we’re tired of being told what the message is. Show us the people. We’ll figure it out.