★★★★☆
Rafael Manuel’s first feature, set over one hot day at a Manila golf club, is the work of a director in complete control of his craft, and a quietly vicious satire of who serves whom.
Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), 17, has come from the rural north to work as a tee girl at an elite country club outside Manila. Her job is to place balls for powerful men and then step out of their way. Manuel, expanding the short that won him a Silver Bear at the Berlinale in 2020, follows her through a single sweltering shift in long, still, immaculately composed frames.
The comedy is droll; the dread creeps in slowly. Filipiñana sits somewhere between Antonioni’s alienated wide shots, Ruben Östlund’s eye for the absurdities of wealth and Roy Andersson’s deadpan tableaux, but the blend is entirely Manuel’s own. The members’ small talk and the staff’s careful silences sketch a social order that colonial rule built and nobody since has dismantled, and the course itself, a private expanse of watered green in a hot, crowded city, glistens with sun-drenched menace.
Agoto says little and gives away even less, which is in the nature of her job; her strain shows in small things – the tension around her mouth as she’s faced with vague and conflicting orders and a pervasive sexualised power imbalance. This is a deliberately slow film, and it asks for patience early on – but it repays the audience in spades. Manuel, who made the original short as his graduation film at the London Film School, knows exactly where to put the camera and exactly how long to leave it there, soaking up the disquiet, and Xenia Patricia’s photography makes the heat almost visible. Filipiñana has been chosen as its country’s entry for the International Feature Oscar, and deservedly so. This is easily one of the greatest films that the Philippines has ever produced.
Filipiñana played at the London Film Festival; BFI Distribution releases it in UK cinemas on 20 November 2026.