Bridgit sees us

By Herman M. Lagon

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t watched With Love, Bridgit, you may want to see it before reading further. You can still visit Brgy. Inday at the UP Visayas Cinematheque. So, fair warning: some barangay secrets are about to escape. And since the narrator happens to be a dog who goes practically everywhere, there are quite a few of them.

My daughter and I finally entered Brgy. Inday last August 15, upon the invitation of director Kevin Pison Piamonte, a distant cousin of mine, and Judith Angela Grey, the film’s marketing person and my former co-teacher at Ateneo de Iloilo. Around us at the UPV Cinematheque were families, friends, local film enthusiasts, actors, and people simply curious about what an Ilonggo-made comedy could do. We also had a quick chat with broadcaster Joyce Clavecillas, who has a cameo in the film, and producer Bobby Rodriguez. It felt less like entering a multiplex and more like dropping by a neighborhood gathering.

Then the lights went out, and Brgy. Inday took over.

The premise is serious enough. A community faces demolition to make way for a government project. Families who have built their lives there must confront relocation and the disappearance of the place they call home. Yet Piamonte does not turn them into a parade of miserable people waiting for our sympathy. They gossip, flirt, pray, quarrel over linâ-gâ, play bingo, fall in love, mourn, compete, and make fools of themselves. They are already living full lives before somebody decides their houses have to go. That matters. The film was shaped with actual residents of the community where it was shot, alongside local actors, which perhaps explains why Brgy. Inday feels inhabited rather than assembled for a camera.

The location does some of the storytelling before anybody has to explain it. Brgy. Inday was filmed in Brgy. San Rafael in Mandurriao. Beyond the modest houses rise the polished buildings of Iloilo’s newer commercial districts. On one side: glass, concrete, investment, and the unmistakable confidence of a city moving forward. On the other: old houses, sari-sari stores, neighbors, santos, livelihoods, and lives that do not fit neatly into architectural renderings. The film does not ask us to choose between development and community. It asks the harder question: when a city moves forward, what—and who—might get left behind?

Bridgit sees all of this from close to the ground. That turns out to be a clever place from which to observe human beings. She belongs to nobody and everybody. I believe that Piamonte thought this is precisely the point: a dog can wander from one household to another without the political loyalties, family allegiances, and personal biases that restrict the human characters. Bridgit hears the gossip, witnesses the quarrels, wanders through grief, and somehow survives all the human drama without needing a barangay clearance. She is witness, neighborhood fixture, and occasional escape artist from unpleasant reality.

One of those escapes gave my daughter and me perhaps our biggest laugh of the afternoon. During a tense moment, Bridgit retreats to “happy thoughts,” and suddenly the scene erupts into Dinagyang-like energy. Amid all the movement, one dark-skinned fellow simply stands there, posed like a Santo Niño while everyone else goes full festival mode. That was it. We lost it. Sometimes comedy works because of an elaborate setup. Sometimes one person stands perfectly still and defeats the entire cinema.

That looseness is one of the film’s charms. Piamonte apparently gave his actors room to improvise and inhabit their characters, and you can feel it in scenes that seem to breathe rather than wait obediently for the next line. Emman Abatayo’s music helps enormously. It knows when to join the fun and when to step aside. The film moves through comedy, grief, absurdity, and tenderness, and the score helps those shifts feel like parts of the same barangay rather than separate films stitched together.

I was especially happy to see Kristoffer Rhys Grabato as Shebang, the flamboyant barangay captain at the center of much of the community’s chaos and courage. I knew Kristoffer years ago as an ISUFST education student who worked with our International Affairs and Linkages office during the SEA Teacher Student Exchange Program at Universitas Ahmad Dahlan in Indonesia. He spent a month there with five other ISUFST students. Even then, he was already the young man you called when something needed choreography, performance, or a little theatrical life. Seeing him command the screen now felt less like discovering a talent than seeing one arrive somewhere it had long been heading.

Shebang could easily have become a caricature. Instead, Kristoffer gives him enough conviction to make the comedy work without reducing the character to the joke. The film does something similar with its treatment of sexuality and gender. Its queer characters are allowed romance, vanity, confusion, ambition, humor, heartbreak, and ordinary foolishness—the same untidy privileges heterosexual characters have enjoyed on screen forever. Port’s eventual life as a makeup artist in Japan particularly pleased my daughter, Parvane, who immediately said Japan made sense for someone with that kind of makeup and salon talent. That small comment stayed with me because the film does not insist on explaining Port to death. It simply allows him a future.

Then there are the sisters and their linâ-gâ war. One sells hers for ₱50; the other undercuts her at ₱49.50. Fifty centavos, apparently, is enough to destabilize sibling diplomacy. Their insults, rivalry, grief over their seafarer husbands, and eventual movement toward other relationships are funny because they are not entirely ridiculous. Families can turn food into competition, affection into teasing, and an old grievance into something reheated at every reunion. We recognize these women because some version of them has probably borrowed a monobloc chair from us and forgotten to return it.

The film’s religiosity feels similarly familiar. Faith here is not displayed behind glass. It lives beside gossip, folk healing, funerals, festivals, quarrels, and everyday bargaining with heaven. When demolition finally comes, the sight of residents carrying their santos from the community lands harder than a speech about heritage could. These are objects that have watched baptisms, wakes, novenas, birthdays, family quarrels, and ordinary Tuesdays. A house can be demolished in an afternoon. What people have placed inside it for decades is harder to measure.

This is where With Love, Bridgit becomes more than a collection of good jokes. The question underneath the comedy is painfully current: What exactly do we mean by progress? Relocation may provide another roof, but a community is not only a roof. The woman selling soup needs customers. The worker needs affordable transportation. Children have classmates. Older people have neighbors who check whether they have eaten. Families have churches, sari-sari stores, routines, shortcuts, memories, and people who know their business before they have decided whether it is anybody’s business. Move the houses, and those invisible networks do not automatically come along.

The film does not handle everything equally well. With such a large ensemble, some stories receive more attention than others, and the shift from comedy to demolition feels a little abrupt. Perhaps that looseness is inevitable—or even intentional—when fitting so many lives into a limited running time and the realities of regional filmmaking. Barangays, after all, are full of stories whose endings we never quite know. These are quibbles, not complaints, and they hardly diminish what the film gets right.

There is also Dr. Clement Camposano’s brief appearance as the city mayor. He does not need much screen time. He looks natural enough in the role of a politician associated with the project threatening Brgy. Inday, and later his face survives mostly through a campaign-style poster during the community’s darkest stretch. There is something deliciously Pinoy about that image. The politician may be nowhere around when things become difficult, but the tarpaulin remains remarkably dependable.

By the end, however, my daughter was thinking less about the mayor than about Bridgit. She liked the unveiling of Bridgit’s Hachikō-like memorial and the idea that Brgy. Inday survives beyond its physical location. That could have become sentimental very quickly, but there is truth underneath it. Most of us carry vanished places around. The grandparents’ house that has been sold. The school building that was demolished. The old neighborhood swallowed by commercial development. The sari-sari store replaced by something shinier. We eventually discover that “home” is partly geography and partly the people, sounds, smells, jokes, rituals, and memories we refuse to surrender.

That may also explain why films like this matter. With Love, Bridgit is unmistakably Ilonggo not because somebody sprinkled local references over a generic script, but because its humor, language, food, faith, family arrangements, festival energy, and contradictions grow from here. The Hiligaynon is not decoration. Neither are Dinagyang, linâ-gâ, the santos, or the barangay itself. As Piamonte has pointed, the emotions can travel beyond Iloilo precisely while remaining rooted in a particular community. The more specific the film becomes, strangely enough, the easier it is to recognize something human in it.

And this is where the conversation should become larger than one movie.

Regional artists need more than applause after the credits. They need time, training, audiences, screening spaces, collaborators, institutional backing, and grants that give them enough room to take creative risks. With Love, Bridgit itself shows what can happen when those pieces begin to come together. The production involved ERK Film Production, the Film Development Council of the Philippines, CreatePH, and UP Visayas; Piamonte had earlier received an FDCP production grant for the film. Support does not manufacture artistry. It gives artistry a fighting chance to become an actual film instead of remaining a script in somebody’s drawer.

Piamonte, Rodriguez, their collaborators, and today’s community of Ilonggo filmmakers are adding another stretch to a road regional artists have been building for years. Piamonte himself has traveled it through works such as Solo, Dog Eaters, Baboy Talunon, and others. My hope is that many younger artists will get the chance to follow—and then go farther. Some will make better films. I hope they do. That is what a healthy artistic community should want: not disciples endlessly repeating their elders, but new filmmakers given enough trust, resources, and freedom to surprise them.

Perhaps that is what stayed with me after my daughter and I left the Cinematheque. Not simply that we had watched a funny Ilonggo movie, although we certainly had. It was the pleasure of seeing lives we recognize treated as worthy of the screen—the food, accents, saints, jokes, flaws, loves, losses, and neighborhoods that rarely receive top billing.

Brgy. Inday eventually disappears. Bridgit cannot save it. Neither can nostalgia.

But she sees it.

And sometimes the first thing we owe a place, a people, or an artist is exactly that: the chance to be seen.

***

Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.