{"id":587798,"date":"2026-07-16T00:20:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T00:20:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/587798\/"},"modified":"2026-07-16T00:20:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T00:20:22","slug":"filipinana-trailer-what-lurks-beneath-a-philippine-country-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/587798\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Filipi\u00f1ana’ Trailer: What Lurks Beneath a Philippine Country Club"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cBeneath the pristine surface of a country club in the Philippines, a sinister buried truth,\u201d as I wrote out of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One of the films to make the biggest splash out of the\u00a0Sundance Film Festival<\/a>\u2018s 2026 World Cinema Dramatic Competition, where it won the Special Jury Award for Creative Vision: first-time writer\/director Rafael Manuel\u2019s \u201cFilipi\u00f1ana.\u201d With a surreal visual language that hat-tips everyone from Jacques Tati to Michael Haneke and the filmmaker\u2019s longtime mentor Jia Zhangke, the\u00a0film<\/a>\u00a0is a striking, startling class critique based on Manuel\u2019s own Silver Bear-winning 2020 short film. Kino Lorber releases the film in theaters starting August 28. Watch the trailer below.<\/p>\n

\"HOLLYWOOD,<\/a> \"THE<\/a> <\/p>\n

More from the official synopsis: \u201cIsabel, a 17-year-old from the rural north of the Philippines, works at a posh country club outside Manila.\u00a0Amid stifling heat and pervasive drought, she lines up golf balls for powerful men to drive into the carefully manicured verdant horizon. Between shifts, she wanders the immaculate grounds, sampling its luxuries and exploring its liminal spaces. The club\u2019s members, including an industrialist and his expatriate niece, the president and his pampered wife, and a slew of Chinese tourists, engage in a complex dance with the doting and subservient staff. But something is rotting beneath the pristine fairways of the elite resort, as Isabel discovers when she tries to return a mislaid golf club to its patriarchal director, Dr. Palanca. The deeper she journeys into Alabang\u2019s most exclusive corners, the closer she gets to the violent truths of the club, her native Philippines, and her own past.\u201d<\/p>\n

The cast includes Jorrybell Agoto, Carmen Castellanos, Teroy Guzman, Carlitos Siguion-Reyna, Isabel Sicat, and Nour Hooshmand.<\/p>\n

IndieWire\u2019s Chief Film Critic David Ehrlich<\/a> wrote out of Sundance, \u201cMore than any other\u00a0film\u00a0that comes to mind, Rafael Manuel\u2019s \u2018Filipi\u00f1ana<\/a>\u2018 taps into something that I\u2019ve always found inherently sinister about\u00a0golf\u00a0courses: Sprawling gardens of solipsism that invite players to compete against themselves (and offer masters of the universe an ideal environment to affirm their status as they broker deals with each other between holes), they\u2019re so elegantly imposed upon the land that it\u2019s easy to forget that something else was ever there in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film opens August 28 in New York and September 4 in Los Angeles, with more dates to follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cBeneath the pristine surface of a country club in the Philippines, a sinister buried truth,\u201d as I wrote…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":587799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[263],"tags":[18,117,249343,597,19,17,327,1983],"class_list":["post-587798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-filipinana","tag-film","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-trailers"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116926797549581877","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/587799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}