Cinemalaya 2025: Padamlagan

 

In Bicolano, the word padamlagan refers to the light (usually a gas lantern or gasera) that is left on before one sleeps. The light keeps vigil over the night, perhaps also serving as a signal for those who might want to come home in the dark. There is a sense of hope, however determined, for someone to come home, as long as the flame is kept burning.

Doring (Ely Buendia) keeps such a flame. He is a devotee of the Blessed Virgin of Peñafrancia, particularly a voyadores, tasked with delivering the Blessed Virgin from her shrine to the Naga Metropolitan Cathedral via a fluvial procession. Doring's relationship with his son Ivan (Esteban Mara) has been deteriorating. Ivan has started dabbling in activities that Doring does not understand. This comes to a head when, during the procession, the Colgante bridge overlooking a part of the river collapses, leading to the deaths of more than a hundred people. With Ivan missing in the aftermath of the tragedy, Doring sets out to search for his son.

Aside from its narrative sections, Padamlagan also intersperses several documentary-style interview segments, telling the story of the Colgante bridge - that it had apparently been rebuilt after a previous collapse, that it was ill-equipped to hold that many people, and that it would eventually be rebuilt again. Considering recent events where infrastructure projects were completed in substandard ways (or not even completed at all) because of massive internal corruption, it's kind of depressing to think that the same problems persist more than 50 years later. The bridge itself embodies a kind of cyclical regression towards tragedy because people forget, because people keep on making the same mistakes.

All this is gorgeously lensed by DP Steven Evangelio, who frames Doring amidst a sea of people, or trapped in hallways or corridors, bathed in dreamy light as if everything we're seeing is a memory. In its pace and in the way it executes its story, it shares a few similarities with fellow Cinemalaya batchmate Raging. But Padamlagan doesn't go much beyond that, and while Buendia is an okay actor, I don't think he manages to carry the film on his shoulders. I often found myself unable to get anything out of his performance other than his stoicism. Also, while the narrative pieces are there, tying these themes of searching to the larger political milieu feels lacking.

It still is a decent film all things considered, though in the end even with a seventy minute runtime it feels like there's a lot of fluff. I wonder if the film would be better served as a short instead.