Gisuwat ni Samantha Radaza • April 19, 2026

Non-fiction • Interviews

There are films you watch—and then there are films you carry home with you. Pinikas is the latter.

I walked into Gateway Cineplex 18 on a Saturday afternoon expecting the usual mainstream provincial love story. What I encountered instead was something far more intimate, far more unsettling—a film that doesn’t just tell you about sacrifice, but quietly asks what you’ve already given up without noticing.

By the end of the night, it made perfect sense that Pinikas, the lone Cebuano-language film in the full-length lineup, would go on to dominate the Sinag Maynila Film Festival 2026, taking home Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Musical Score. Its director, Cris Fuego, along with lead actors Angela Villarin and Jade Makawili, would also be awarded as the Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Actor respectively. But awards, as it turns out, are just the cleanest way to summarize something that is anything but simple.

Because Pinikas (Halved) is not merely about love. Not really. It is about being split down the middle and learning to live with the fracture.

Fuego speaks about the title almost casually, but there’s weight beneath it. On the surface, it refers to something tangible: buwad pinikas nga nukos, the dried butterfly squid that Maya, the film’s protagonist, prepares in her seaside village in Pintuyan, Leyte. It’s a detail that roots the story firmly in the everyday textures of provincial life which rarely make it to the big screen without being softened or romanticized.

But the deeper meaning reveals itself slowly. Maya, played with striking restraint by Villarin, is halved in every sense that matters. Between love and obligation. Between staying and leaving. Between the life she wants and the life she has already been handed.

Her relationship with Nilo, portrayed by Makawili with a quiet, almost painful sincerity, unfolds not in grand declarations but in glances, pauses, and the kind of silence that says more than dialogue ever could. And then there is the intrusion of another possibility—a foreigner, a different future, the age-old illusion that somewhere else might be better. It is here that Pinikas sharpens into something more critical, quietly interrogating the cultural impulse, which is still deeply embedded, to equate escape with progress… to believe that leaving is the only way forward.

But even that is not the film’s core.

“This is more than a just love story,” Fuego says. And you believe him. Because what emerges, almost unexpectedly, is a coming-of-age story—not in the conventional sense of youthful discovery, but in the heavier, more complicated way Filipinos often experience it. Maya is not just choosing between two people; she is choosing between herself and everyone who depends on her. Her family… especially her siblings.

It is a familiar story, but one rarely told this honestly. The breadwinner. The child who becomes the solution. The quiet, unspoken expectation that love for family must always come at a cost.

Fuego doesn’t present this as tragedy but as reality.

Perhaps that’s what makes Pinikas feel so personal—not just for him, but for anyone who recognizes themselves in it.

That personal connection extends beyond the narrative and into the very language of the film. Told entirely in Cebuano, Pinikas resists the long-standing gravity of Manila-centric storytelling. In another director’s hands, this might have been a logistical choice. But for Fuego, it is something closer to conviction.

Cebuano, he insists, is not just a medium; it is the message. The humor, in particular, carries a specificity that refuses translation. There are moments in the film where non-Cebuano speakers might smile politely, while Cebuano audiences erupt into laughter that feels almost cathartic. It reminds us that language is not just about understanding words, it’s about recognizing yourself in them.

For Fuego, that recognition traces back to childhood. To a time before electricity, when stories came through the radio, in voices that sounded like home. Long before filmmaking became a possibility, it was already shaping the way he listened, the way he imagined, the way he understood the world.

So when he finally decided to make a film, there was never really a question of what language it would be in.

The real question was how to make it at all.

Pinikas was made without studio backing, without major grants, without the infrastructure that typically carries films from idea to screen. Fuego, an engineer by profession, financed the project himself—drawing from savings, taking out loans, and relying heavily on the community he grew up in.

The film was shot in his hometown, with neighbors stepping in as extras and familiar spaces doubling as locations. There is something almost poetic about that—about a story so rooted in place being made possible by the very people who inhabit it.

But poetry does not pay for production…

Because halfway through filming, the money ran out.

There is a particular kind of panic that comes with that realization—the kind that doesn’t announce itself loudly but settles in your chest and stays there. For Fuego, stopping was not an option. Too many people had already given their time, their energy, their trust. So he borrowed more. He pushed forward.

And then, just as the finish line came into view, the world stopped.

The pandemic turned post-production into a prolonged, uncertain process. From Canada, where he was based at the time, Fuego found himself navigating not just logistical challenges but also emotional ones. There were moments, he admits, when finishing the film felt less like a goal and more like a question.

Six years is a long time to hold onto a story. Long enough for doubt to creep in. Long enough to wonder if it will ever be worth it.

In Fuego’s case, the answer came in the most practical form possible: debt. The loans he took out to fund the film became a constant reminder that Pinikas was not just a dream—it was a responsibility.

“I’m still paying for it,” he says in a jest. And somehow, that makes the film feel even more real because beneath all the artistry, all the recognition, all the eventual success, Pinikas is built on something undeniably human: persistence.

When the film was finally completed in 2025, it did not arrive with fanfare. It moved quietly, first finding audiences in Cebu for free, then abroad in places like Canada and Norway, where even viewers unfamiliar with the language responded to its emotional clarity. Screenings multiplied through word of mouth alone which is a testament to the film’s ability to transcend its own specificity.

By the time it reached Sinag Maynila Film Festival 2026, Pinikas carried none of the usual markers of a frontrunner. Its cast was relatively unknown. Its creators operated outside the traditional centers of power in Philippine cinema. It was, by every conventional measure, a long shot.

A dark horse.

And yet, when the awards were announced, it was Pinikas that stood at the center of it all.

It’s tempting to frame this as an underdog story—and in many ways, it is. But that framing risks oversimplifying what the film actually represents. Because Pinikas is not just a victory for a single production. It is a subtle but undeniable assertion that stories from the Visayas and Mindanao do not need to be translated, adjusted, or diluted to matter.

They already do.

Watching Pinikas, what lingers is not just its narrative, but its texture. The way it feels lived-in. The way it trusts its audience to sit with discomfort. The way it refuses to resolve everything neatly, instead leaving you with a cliffhanger that feels less like an ending and more like an invitation.

There are plans, Fuego hints, for what comes next. A continuation. Perhaps even a trilogy.

But even if Pinikas stood alone, it would still feel complete in the way that matters most—not because it answers every question, but because it dares to ask them in the first place.

And somewhere between those questions—between love and duty, between staying and leaving, between being whole and being halved—you begin to recognize something uncomfortably familiar.

Not just in Maya.

Not just in breadwinners.

But in yourself.

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