Julie Lluch’s Piscean Deluge (1990) pictures a woman traversing troubled waters, at the peak of a freestyle stroke, catching a breath of air. In parallel, PELIKULA journeys in this volume through the turbulence of a post-pandemic world, navigating waters troubled by virtuality, violence, exploitation, indifference, deceit, disillusionment, discord—our disrupted manners of living with the world and the ways the moving image allows us to make sense of it.

The Kura Sambalani is a white-winged horse that appears at the end of the Tausug epic Parang Sabil (holy warfare) to carry away the martyrs. In this volume of PELIKULA, the wars of today lie siege to martyrdom: fascism spins mythologies to paint itself as a necessary evil; authoritarianism camouflages impunity with good intentions in virtual/ized reality; the empire seduces and reduces, building promises it can profit from.

Spring is a season of both beauty and fragility. In this special edition of PELIKULA, we celebrate the blossoming of a friendship with the Japan Foundation, Manila, with the translation of selected articles into Japanese. This edition recognizes language as the entry point of meaningful conversation, at the same time that it respects language as a unique bearer of cultural knowledge. Here, the work of translating essays on cinema ventures toward cross-cultural dialogue with Japan: for now, a brief glimpse of our shared histories, but also, a promise of richer seasons.

An amalgamation of images from Lav Diaz’s films frame the volume’s “outward orientation” of Philippine cinema, signifying the place of Filipino film in a resonant Southeast Asian regional cinema while also capturing in one picture the mood of the times. Diaz arguably represents a, if not the, crux of myriad contradictions and debates in contemporary cinema: nationalism and internationalization, the (g)local and the cosmopolitan,  experimentation and access, art and function, region and nation, memory and imagination. 

Sedition. This was the criminal charge brought against Lino Brocka and Behn Cervantes for speaking up for workers during a transport strike in 1985. By then, the Marcos dictatorship had cultivated innumerable vehement critics, many among the ranks of artists and film workers, who campaigned for the restoration of civil liberties and protested state-sponsored human rights violations—campaigns Brocka and Cervantes advanced to the chagrin of the state that tried to silence them under threat of the maximum penalty of death.

Who is Isabel Acuña? Smiling next to her husband, the vaunted “Father of Philippine Cinema” José Nepomuceno, she is surfaced from forgotten history on the 2019 cover of the PELIKULA as a similarly important force: pioneer casting director, art director, and producer. Many other facets of Philippine film history are likewise recuperated in the pages of the journal as it returns 20 years since its first release in 1999. Coming just at the heels of Philippine cinema’s centennial celebration, it dives into the vibrant, many yet unwritten, narratives of Philippine cinema, chronicling and provoking important conversations on its various pasts and possibilities.