Cinemalaya 2025, Part 1: ‘As the Hydra Devours History’, ‘Cinemartyrs’, ‘Child No. 82’—Angry, Erudite, Unforgiving

Every Cinemalaya year seems to arrive with its own pulse, a mood that quietly defines the lineup. If last year’s slate found solace in intimacy, 2025 feels haunted by inheritance. These are films obsessed with what we carry: grief, history, myth, and the responsibility of remembering when so much conspires to make us forget. Across the festival, ghosts linger not as apparitions but as arguments: between generations, between truths, between the living and the conveniently misremembered.

The first three titles in this year’s batch—“Habang Nilalamon ng Hydra ang Kasaysayan,” “Cinemartyrs,” and “Child No. 82 (Son of Boy Kana)”—all turn the act of remembering into an act of defiance. They ask, in their own ways, “What does it mean to resist erasure? And how much of ourselves must we give up to keep the story straight?”

‘As the Hydra Devours History’: Myths, Memory, and the Middle-Class Mirror

Dustin Celestino’s “As the Hydra Devours History” (Tagalog: Habang Nilalamon ng Hydra ang Kasaysayan) opens not with subtlety but with a sting: a defeated presidential candidate’s team trying to compose a concession speech, one of them remarking that people keep voting the same devils back into power. It’s a scene so nakedly drawn from the recent past, so much that the “This is a work of fiction” disclaimer almost plays as satire. From there, the film divides itself into eight chapters, each orbiting a different figure caught in the undertow of political loss.

We meet Kiko (Jojit Lorenzo), a strategist whose cynicism threatens to calcify into apathy; David (Zanjoe Marudo), a speechwriter whose faith in reason falters against the machinery of lies; Bea (Dolly de Leon), a history teacher tasked with teaching a past her nation refuses to remember; and Mela (Mylene Dizon), a lawyer forced to reconcile her family’s complicity with her own ideals. Through them, Celestino sketches the emotional geography of disillusionment, the aftermath of losing not just an election but a worldview.

A Mythology-Inspired Mumblecore That Borders on Over-Exposition

The title’s mythological backbone—Sisyphus, Cassandra, Tantalus, the Hydra—is both inspired and limiting. It lends the film an almost tragic rhythm, mapping Greek torment onto Filipino despair, but it also tempts Celestino into over-exposition (Christopher Nolan, are you ready to top this next year?). At times, the metaphors come prefaced and footnoted in dialogue, as though the director fears his audience might miss the allegory. They won’t. If anything, the sharpness of ‘Hydra’ lies not in its commentary but in its textures: the restless camera of Kara Moreno, the claustrophobic compositions, the way glasses of water and bowls of food become silent witnesses to conversations that feel both too intellectual and too intimate for comfort.

Among the ensemble, Dolly de Leon anchors the film with ferocious calm. Her Bea—a woman clinging to pedagogy as an act of resistance—is the film’s conscience, its reminder that forgetting is a privilege. When she speaks about the impossibility of teaching history in a nation seemingly allergic to it, the scene lands not as a monologue but as indictment. It’s here that Celestino finds the emotional core he sometimes risks losing to polemic: the recognition that disinformation thrives not just on malice, but on fatigue.

Still, for all its didactic edges, ‘Hydra’ feels necessary. For all its perceived preachiness, I still emerged convinced with the film’s refusal to flatter its intended audience—the weary, well-meaning middle class—but to confront their complicity head-on instead. There’s a certain bravery in that. Celestino knows his film may preach to the choir, but he also knows the choir needs a mirror. If hope is indeed, as the film argues, a choice made in darkness, then ‘Hydra’ is both confession and call to arms—a reminder that remembering is itself an act of resistance.

Grade: B-

‘Cinemartyrs’: Haunting History, Female Specters, and the Cinema as Afterlife

Set in 1998, Sari Dalena’s “Cinemartyrs” begins like a ghost story disguised as a student thesis film. Shirin (Nour Hooshmand), a young filmmaker, wants to complete a documentary on the Philippine–American War—complete with a chakra-believing Angel Aquino as the Virgin Mary and Lav Diaz as gun-toting Jesus Christ. Shirin’s project spirals into obsession when she’s told to “go south” and capture the forgotten atrocities of Mindanao, so as to avoid making a documentary film that’s “Luzon-centric.” What starts as an academic pursuit becomes something far stranger: a film haunted by the weight of the very history it tries to resurrect.

With “Cinemartyrs,” Dalena blurs the line between recreation and possession. When Shirin’s crew begins restaging a massacre, the shoot itself becomes a séance: the sound crew picks up screams and human voices in the middle of the forest, the cast and crew convulse, and the ghosts of the slain take over their bodies as if to finish what history left unwitnessed. The result is a film that operates on several frequencies—part docufiction, part supernatural horror, part love letter to the ghosts of cinema itself.

Framing this chaos are archival voices of women directors like Carmen Concha, Susana de Guzman, and Consuelo Osorio, names largely lost to the mainstream histories of Philippine cinema. In invoking them, Dalena constructs a dialogue across generations, between the silenced and those still shouting into the void. To this effect, “Cinemartyrs” becomes not just an elegy for the massacred, but for the erased women who filmed in the margins, who fought for space in a medium eager to forget them.

An Ambitious Film Whose Reach Sometimes Exceeds Its Grasp

The film doesn’t always hold its many layers together. Cedrick Juan’s “Amboy” boyfriend character, for instance, feels underwritten, and the structural leaps—especially between the Mindanao shoot and the final surreal coda in Luzon—risk alienating those who expect linear catharsis. Yet the film’s imperfections are part of its power. Dalena doesn’t want neat coherence; she wants rupture, echo, reincarnation. When Shirin’s body literally turns into a projector in the finale, it’s both weird and transcendent: cinema as childbirth, history as possession, light as testimony.

Technically, it’s immaculate: Neil Daza and Kiri Dalena’s lensing drenches every frame in humid, handheld immediacy; Teresa Barrozo’s score hums like a buried scream; the sound design, alive with whispers and static, feels like memory clawing its way through celluloid. Beneath the madness, it feels to me that Dalena is making a radical argument: that the act of filmmaking, especially by women, especially about trauma, is an act of bravery.

If ‘Hydra’ interrogates how we remember, then “Cinemartyrs” asks what remembering costs. And in the film’s final shot—a beam of light erupting from a woman’s body, illuminating the wall like a screen—Dalena finds the ultimate image of resurrection: the female filmmaker as conduit, the body as archive, the cinema as afterlife.

Grade: B

‘Child No. 82 (Son of Boy Kana)’: Fathers, Fandom, and the Messy Inheritance of Idolatry

Tim Rone Villanueva’s “Child No. 82 (Son of Boy Kana)” is the kind of debut that wears its heart—and its tonal chaos—on its sleeve. It’s part melodrama, part social satire, and part love letter to the gaudy heroism of the olden days of Philippine cinema. Max (JM Ibarra), a chronically online teen who spends his days on “PocPoc” (likely the most accurate and hilarious fake app name in recent cinema), lip-syncs to lines from Boy Kana’s movies as if invoking a deity. Boy Kana (Vhong Navarro)—an obvious amalgam of Fernando Poe Jr., Ramon Revilla Sr., and Joseph Estrada—is a legend whose shadow is as lurid as it is long. 

However, for Max, whose mother Ali (Rochelle Pangilinan-Solinap) refuses to speak of the man, Boy Kana isn’t just a missing father; he’s mythology. So when Boy Kana’s death makes headlines, along with news that the superstar left nearly a hundred illegitimate children and an “official” list of 81 acknowledged heirs, Max sets out to prove he’s number 82. The journey from Ilocos to Cavite becomes less about inheritance and more about belonging. 

Villanueva frames this journey like a pilgrimage through the ruins of fandom, and here we see a lovable roughness to the film. We can sense a first-time filmmaker pushing against the limits of genre, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes brilliantly. The editing jitters, the pacing wobbles, but the heart is undeniable. Villanueva’s eye for visual play—the 8-bit graphics, the retro-fantaserye flourishes, the PocPoc montages—evokes the old Mars Ravelo universe reimagined through Gen Z screens. It’s camp that remembers where it came from.

Legacy, Lineage, and the Fan Fiction of Fatherhood

JM Ibarra carries the film with an earnestness that compensates for its tonal turbulence. In his debut feature role, Ibarra plays Max as fragile as he is foolhardy—an avatar of the Filipino son who mistakes virality for visibility. You sense an actor figuring himself out alongside his character. His chemistry with Pangilinan-Solinap gives the story its emotional ballast: she plays a mother whose restraint conceals deep hurt, grounding the spectacle in something tender and true.

And then there’s Irma Adlawan, who steals the show as Mother Betty, the Cavite fan-club president whose devotion to Boy Kana borders on the religious. Adlawan plays her not as caricature but as cautionary tale: a woman consumed by parasocial fervor, emblematic of the fandom culture that treats celebrities as saviors and refuses to let go, even in death. Her scenes veer from hilarious to chilling, a microcosm of how obsession curdles into madness.

Yes, it’s messy—tonally and emotionally. The editing meanders, the writing leans on corny sentiment, and the earnestness is turned up to eleven. But there’s something disarmingly pure about Villanueva’s approach. He isn’t mocking his characters; he’s trying to understand why they cling to myths that fail them. The result is a crowd-pleaser that might feel too box-office friendly for something like Cinemalaya. 

Then again, its corniness is a kind of courage. In a festival season haunted by ghosts of history and ideology, “Child No. 82” is that rare debut that barrels forward with equal parts sincerity and chaos. And we’re all for it.

Grade: B-

Watch out for the part 2 of our Cinemalaya 2025 coverage.

‘As the Hydra Devours History’, ‘Cinemartyrs’, ‘Child No. 82’ will screen and compete at this year’s Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, which runs from October 3 to 12, 2025. Follow us for continuing dispatches, reviews, capsules, and wrap-ups.