Women’s place in the revolution comes alive in ‘Lakambini: Gregoria de Jesus’

MANILA, Philippines, November 29 ------ A revolutionary history that is both feminine and feminized is at the core of Lakambini: Gregoria de Jesus, a full-length feature co-directed by Arjanmar Rebeta and Jeffrey Jeturian, which screened earlier this month in local theaters and recently at the 2025 QCinema International Film Festival.

The story of Ka Oryang, as she’s commonly known, has already been translated on stage this year: first as a period romance drama in Boni Ilagan’s O, Pag-ibig na Makapangyarihan, which ran from February through March; then as a frantic musical in Tanghalang Pilipino’s Gregoria Lakambini: A Pinay Pop Musical, which just opened two weeks ago and is set to run until December 14. That another project focused on the revolutionary hero is released for the public to watch and mull over should not come as a surprise, considering that 2025 marks Lakambini’s 150th birth anniversary.

This time, Rebeta and Jeturian, who directed the film in vastly different circumstances, map the eponymous character’s storied life and struggle through a meta docufiction in an effort “to reclaim the legacy of a forgotten heroine.”

The narrative, like its stage counterparts, enunciates the place of women in the struggle for national liberation, allowing the film to be part of a broader feminist resistance literature in the Philippines. Divided into chapters, Lakambini: Gregoria de Jesus chiefly explores the heroine’s active role in the Katipunan, an armed revolutionary group led by the Supremo Andres Bonifacio (played by Rocco Nacino in the film) that sought independence of the country from Spanish control at the tail end of the 1800s.

On one hand, it plays as an epistolary biopic suffused with histories both private and public that renegotiate Gregoria’s position in our national memory and in the revolution — past Andres and the men she loved. On the other hand, it doubles as a meta documentary on the making of the film, beginning in 2015, when the script was initially submitted for consideration at the Metro Manila Film Festival, tapping Jeturian as the director, through 2025, when it was finally completed, with Rebeta already at the helm.

Producer Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil said in a talkback following the film’s final screening at QCinema that she labored for the film to be realized precisely due to the lack of local historical films featuring women when she was still conceiving the project in 2012. “It’s all men: Quezon, Gomburza, Rizal, Bonifacio, Sakay, Aguinaldo.”

“And maybe because I’m a woman, so I’m wondering ‘What has been the role of women [in the revolution?]’” she continued. “And I wanted someone from that perspective during the birthing of [our] nation. When I found her, well, she’s supposed to be married to the father of the Philippine revolution, the first to fight against Western colonization in Asia, but we don’t know anything about her. It’s as if when Bonifacio died, she died as well.”

From a formal standpoint, the movie is sort of a deconstruction of a typical historical biopic. Yet, heavily stylized as it is, it still leans on a linear sensibility. It makes use of its period setting to dramatize the curious corners in the life of its protagonist, but it tersely pulls you out of it through talking heads, pull quotes, and fact-checks that stubbornly interrupt its dramatic specifics, whose intensity dissipates as a consequence of that directorial language.

Its images are inescapably uneven, given the gap between the 2015 footage, shot for just nine days before the film’s sponsors backed out, and the latest material. Even so, it’s hard to deny that significant parts of it also work to fascinating effect, its primary impulse edging toward historical education and feminist conviction.

Source: rappler.com