Tara Illenberger’s Stark Vision in Tigkiliwi

By Noel Galon de Leon

In her most resonant and poetically charged film to date, Tara Illenberger returns to the director’s chair with Tigkiliwi, a visually arresting and emotionally evocative drama that probes the heart of rural life in the Philippines during its most overlooked season, the lull between harvests, when survival becomes its own form of resistance. Winning seven awards at the 2025 Puregold Cinepanalo Film Festival, including Jury Prize and Best Screenplay, Tigkiliwi is far more than a seasonal portrait. It is an aching exploration of poverty, community, and the spiritual interstices between what is lost and what must be found. Illenberger, whose past works (Brutus, High Tide, Guni Guni) blend the visceral with the visionary, brings her full mastery to bear here, imbuing every frame with empathy, purpose, and a haunting sense of time standing still.

The word Tigkiliwi, derived from the Hiligaynon term “kiwi” (askew), refers to a period of social and economic limbo. It is the in-between, when the rice fields lie barren and so, too, do the people’s hopes. This is not just a backdrop; it’s the living, breathing atmosphere of the film. As the rains dry up and hunger creeps in, so too does desperation, sometimes in the form of petty crime, sometimes cloaked in myth, as malevolent spirits said to descend during this time.

Into this world step two orphans, played with quiet brilliance and unforced vulnerability, especially from breakout child actor JP Larroder, who is nothing short of a revelation. Their journey is not a straightforward survival tale, but a story of unexpected alliances and spiritual rebirth. As they manage the spectral and literal dangers of Tigkiliwi, they find not only shelter but family in the unlikeliest of places.

Illenberger, who began her career as an editor (credited in over 80 feature films), deploys her background with precision here. Every cut, every dissolve, feels earned. Her pacing allows us to linger in the silences, the exhausted sighs of matriarchs, the brittle laughter of children playing amid ruins, the soft rustle of wind through banana leaves. The rural setting, filmed in the idyllic but hardscrabble towns of San Joaquin and Ajuy, Iloilo is both grounded and mythic, teeming with life even in scarcity.

Illenberger has always worn her advocacies on her sleeve, heritage, the environment, the social cohesion of rural communities, and here, they bloom in full. This is cinema that respects its subjects, refuses to exoticize poverty, and insists on dignity for the overlooked.

Veteran actress Ruby Ruiz brings a towering performance, equal parts fragility and fire, as a hardened woman who opens her home and her heart. Ruiz, long one of Philippine cinema’s most quietly powerful performers, delivers a role that should earn her further recognition. Gabby Padilla and Sunshine Teodoro lend further gravity, their performances steeped in realism, navigating trauma and tenderness without melodrama.

But it is in JP Larroder that the film finds its emotional anchor. His performance never veers into precociousness. There is a raw, unscripted quality to his pain and resilience, as if he isn’t acting at all but simply surviving in front of the camera.

In an era of bombastic spectacle and algorithm-fed content, Tigkiliwi reminds us what cinema can still do, capture the soul of a people, the rhythms of a culture, and the whisper of the unseen. It is a film that believes in storytelling not as escape, but as exorcism, as a way of naming what hurts so healing can begin.

It is also deeply Filipino, but in the most generous sense. Its specificity becomes universal, the ache of hunger, the need for belonging, the fear of invisibility, the fragile grace of human connection. Watching Tigkiliwi is not just seeing a movie; it’s entering a lived world, one that many prefer to look away from, but Illenberger gently, insistently, asks us to see.

Films like Tigkiliwi don’t shout; they linger. They work their way into the bones. They honor silences, illuminate the shadows, and give voice to those who rarely make it to the screen. This is not just a story about orphans or rural hardship. It is about the invisible seasons in all our lives, when hope seems lopsided, and yet somehow, miraculously, endures.

To watch Tigkiliwi is to listen to the rhythm of a land between harvests. It is to understand that even in times of scarcity, there is beauty, there is kinship, and there is survival. See this film. Not just because it won awards. But because it deserves to be remembered.

***

Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in both the Division of Professional Education and U.P. High School in Iloilo. He serves as an Executive Council Member of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.