‘ANG HULING BANLAW NI SUSAN’: A labandera’s daydreams into a CinePanalo 2026 Audience Favorite

“Susan’s Last Rinse” won Best Actress and the Audience Choice Award for its portrait of a working mother worn down by a system that never lets up.

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

Nobody dreams of a glittering Filipiñana while the water is still running. Susan Manalo did, though, and that was the problem.

She was a labandera, tired and determined in equal measure, who washed other people’s clothes so her own family could stay afloat. Her days were a ledger written in suds: piles of laundry, rising prices, endless utang. Somewhere between the scrubbing and the wringing, her body and mind began to give way.

So Susan daydreamed. She imagined herself as a boss, then as a socialite, then as a mayora in full Filipiñana, sleeves stiff as a verdict. The fantasies were not frivolous. They were an inventory of everything the real world had withheld, and each one measured the distance between her life and the one she wanted.

Then a Filipiñana dress turned up in her laundry. Her imagination spiraled, and her grip on reality loosened with it. Her family tried to help. The pressure of poverty and survival had already pushed her too far.

That is the premise of “Ang Huling Banlaw ni Susan,” a 20-minute film in Tagalog with English subtitles. It was directed by Hezekiah Estorque, 20, whose only other listed credit is “Ka Budlay Budlay Gid Ya!,” also made in 2026. The film spent its running time inside one woman’s unraveling and made comedy, fantasy and social commentary share the same cramped room. It ended where it began, in a laundry shop, with Susan staring blankly at a washing machine as if the world kept spinning without her.

Susan was not conjured from nowhere. She began as a pitch from Kurt Romulo, who went on to serve as the film’s creative director and co-wrote the screenplay with Estorque. What started as a simple idea grew into a shared vision, Estorque said in his director’s statement. The two kept coming back to the labanderas of their own university, the University of the Philippines Visayas in Miagao, Iloilo, women they saw every day whose work quietly kept the campus running and whose lives went largely unseen.

The questions came next. Who were these women beyond the laundry? What did they think about while they worked? What waited for them at home, and which dreams had they set aside just to survive another day? Those questions, Estorque said, became Susan.

The hallucinations grew from the same soil. Estorque described them as an escape from reality, but also as “small acts of preservation,” a place where imagination lets a person hold onto a sense of self when life leaves little room for rest or hope. The filmmakers refused to let hardship be Susan’s whole portrait. They wanted her to be seen as a woman with dignity, desires and fears, and an inner world that deserved an audience.

Humor was a deliberate choice, too. Estorque said he and Romulo had watched Filipinos meet difficult circumstances with laughter all their lives, not as a denial of suffering but as a way of carrying it. Anyone who has sat through a lamay knows the reflex.

Audiences at the Puregold CinePanalo Film Festival 2026, which ran from Sept. 23 to Oct. 4, understood Susan immediately. They gave the film the Panalo sa Manonood, the Audience Choice Award. That is a telling honor. Juries reward craft, but audiences reward recognition, and a crowd does not hand out its favorite prize to a story it cannot see itself in.

Jonalyn Mateo took the Panalong Aktres, or Best Actress, for her portrayal of Susan. It was the right call for a role built on silence as much as speech, on the look of a woman who has run the numbers again and again and still comes up short. She led an ensemble that played out the Manalo household: Ian Laczi as Mario, Chayl Flores as Joy and Jeffrey James as Carlo, with Joelie Ann Nono as Aling Bebang.

The film also earned a nomination for Best in Editing. The press kit credits Fahleen Fang as both cinematographer and editor, which means the same eye that framed Susan’s world also decided how quickly it could dissolve into sequins.

The recognition mattered beyond the trophies. The production brought together Filipino creatives, among them Western Visayan filmmakers contributing to the wider Philippine film industry. The film’s run continues this month at CineMatahum 2026 in Iloilo City.

The premise, stripped down, is almost an indictment. A woman works without pause, and the arithmetic of her life still refuses to balance. We have a habit of calling such women resilient, a flattering word that conveniently excuses everyone else from helping. Resilience is what we ask of people when we have no intention of changing the conditions.

“Ang Huling Banlaw ni Susan” declined to flatter. It showed what that endurance costs, and who collects the bill. Its makers asked only that audiences look more closely at those whose labor goes unnoticed.

Susan’s last rinse did not wash anything clean.