Getting ready for Edjop

By Herman M. Lagon

I already know what I will be doing when Edjop reaches cinemas on September 16. I will be looking for a seat. I have not seen the film, so this is neither a review nor an endorsement of something I cannot yet judge. Think of this instead as a little homework before movie night. Edgar “Edjop” Jopson lived only 34 years, but those years spanned student activism, the First Quarter Storm, Martial Law, organized labor, underground resistance, marriage, fatherhood, imprisonment, torture, and death. Walking into the cinema knowing none of that would be like entering halfway through a difficult class and wondering why everybody else already looks worried.

I will surely be bringing my daughter Parvane Mae with me. She has been asking me a lot of questions about Edjop lately, and I can already imagine the conversations we will have on the drive home after the movie. I can tell her about Martial Law, student activism, Ateneo, protest movements, and the complicated choices Edjop made, but cinema offers another doorway. It gives history faces, voices, silences, and moments that books and conversations cannot quite reproduce. Besides, she is already a fan of Elijah Canlas, who plays Jopson, so this may be one history lesson I will not have to persuade her to attend.

Edjop is worth meeting before the lights dim because he did not begin as the revolutionary he eventually became. The young Edjop was bright, accomplished, and seemingly destined for a comfortable future. He finished as Ateneo high school valedictorian, took Management Engineering, and rose to lead the NUSP. Back then, he was a moderate who believed government could still be pushed to change. His student activism earned him recognition as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men in 1970.

Then came the encounter that generations of students would hear about. During the First Quarter Storm, Jopson and other student leaders met President Ferdinand Marcos at Malacañang. Jopson pressed Marcos to put in writing that he would not seek a third presidential term. Marcos reportedly dismissed him as a mere “grocer’s son.” Imagine the scene without knowing how history ends: a young graduate, barely out of college, facing the most powerful man in the country and asking him to bind himself to his word. Whatever one thinks of Jopson’s later politics, there is something recognizable there to any teacher who has encountered a student irritatingly unwilling to stop asking the next question.

His Ateneo formation also makes his journey fascinating to me. Jopson was not the stereotype some people might imagine when they hear “Atenista.” Edjop could have taken the safer road. A bright Management Engineering graduate from a middle-class family, he had every chance at a comfortable career. Instead, he brought his Ateneo ideals of service into the world of workers, eventually becoming a labor organizer and later an underground activist.

But this is where the story should resist becoming a halo-and-hero poster. Jopson radicalized. His confidence in institutional reform deteriorated as political violence intensified and democratic space narrowed. He eventually joined the revolutionary underground. That choice deserves historical understanding, not automatic imitation. Even Benjamin Pimentel, whose extensive interviews produced an important biography of Jopson, later concluded that his first telling had been incomplete. He reckoned more critically with dogmatism, cruelty, and violence within the revolutionary movement itself. That is an important complication: We can condemn authoritarianism and recognize the courage of those who resisted it without pretending that everyone resisting it was therefore correct about everything.

That distinction matters because we Filipinos have become terribly fond of sorting historical people into convenient boxes: hero or villain, patriot or traitor, left or right. Real lives refuse to cooperate. Jopson was a reformist who became a revolutionary, an Atenean who worked among laborers, and an underground leader who was also somebody’s husband and Tatay. He was arrested and tortured in 1979, escaped, and returned underground. His life ended in Davao in September 1982, at only 34. Understanding how a bright young reformist arrived at that point is more useful than simply deciding which box to put him in.

The family story may be what I am least prepared for. While living underground in Mindanao in 1980, Edjop and his wife, Joy, recorded a cassette for their son Noy’s fifth birthday. They sang, asked about school, and talked about ordinary families who had shared food, blankets, pillows, and shelter with them. Two years later, Edjop was dead. Pimentel later reflected that hearing the recording affected him differently after he himself became a father. Suddenly, sacrifice was no longer an impressive word in a political biography. It meant birthdays missed, children growing elsewhere, and a father who would never come home.

There is also something striking about the timing. Edjop opens September 16, only days before the country again remembers Martial Law. A useful historical detail, especially before somebody corrects us in the comments section: Proclamation No. 1081 bears the date September 21, 1972, while Marcos publicly announced Martial Law on September 23. More than half a century later, that period remains contested territory in our national memory. Films cannot substitute for archives, books, survivor testimony, or good history teaching. They can, however, make someone curious enough to open a book afterward — or ask a parent a question on the way home.

And perhaps that is why I am looking forward to watching this one with my daughter. I suspect our real Edjop experience will begin after the screen goes black, on the drive home: Why did he change? Could he have chosen another way? How much should anyone sacrifice for a cause? When does conviction become dogmatism? I do not expect Parvane and me to arrive at identical answers. That is precisely the point. Good education is not always about handing our children conclusions. Sometimes it means giving them enough history to ask better questions.

I hope my other daughter, Psyche, gets to see Edjop, too, albeit online soon, along with friends, colleagues, and people I have met through different causes and advocacies. I would be just as interested in hearing from friends whose politics differ from mine. Perhaps especially them. Historical films become less useful when the theater becomes an echo chamber of people already agreeing with one another. A story like Edjop’s deserves to travel beyond the cinema — to dinner tables, classrooms, faculty rooms, barkada chats, and yes, those family group chats where somebody eventually starts typing in all caps.

So yes, I am excited to watch Edjop. But I would rather enter the cinema curious than convinced. I want to understand what changed this brilliant young reformist, what his convictions cost him and the people he loved, and how someone decides when reform is no longer enough. Just as important is the harder question his story leaves behind: How does anyone know when a cause worth fighting for has itself begun to lose its way?

Maybe that is the best preparation for September 16. Come with someone who agrees with you, perhaps someone who does not, and bring questions. A historical film need not tell us what to think to be worth watching. Sometimes its greater value is making us think again.

Do not meet Edjop already knowing what you want him to prove. Meet Ed first. Then watch.

 ***

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.