The market eats its own: How a UP Visayas student turned Iloilo’s palengke into a horror film

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

There is a shot in Kanibal that looks like nothing at all until you notice it. A woman in an orange apron works her stall. Slabs of pork hang from hooks above her head. Taped to the post behind her is a prayer card to St. Martha, patron of cooks and servants. On her chest, printed across a white campaign shirt, is the smiling face of the mayor she voted for.

By the end of the film, the meat and the woman will be difficult to tell apart.

Kanibal is a 16-minute-and-52-second Hiligaynon short film written and directed by Michael A. Baylon, a Communication and Media Studies student at the University of the Philippines Visayas. It is his debut as a director. It is also one of 20 shorts selected for the Puregold CinePanalo Film Festival 2026, each carrying a ₱200,000 production grant, screening in the Shorts Category (Set A) when the festival runs from September 23 to October 4 across Gateway Cineplex 18, TriNoma, Fairview Terraces, Ayala Malls Feliz, Ayala Malls Circuit, Ayala Malls Manila Bay, and Market! Market!

The premise is deceptively small. Lea (Rowen Jean Ledesma, in her introducing credit) is a meat vendor who runs her stall with her daughter Anne (Lia Sophia Sajonia) underfoot, in a public market loud with the ordinary business of a town buying and selling. One morning, her neighbor at the next stall, Anecita (Ma. Lourdes Maculada), brings news: Mayor Lin (Roselle Lao) is coming to visit. Lea has been a diehard supporter since the campaign. She is thrilled. She prepares a cut of meat as a gift.

The mayor arrives and announces a development project for the market.

What follows is body horror, and Baylon uses the genre exactly the way it was built to be used. As the market begins its transformation — stalls reorganized, spaces reassigned, the familiar geography of a livelihood quietly rearranged — Lea undergoes one of her own. Her body starts to take on the appearance of the meat she sells. The film does not explain the metaphor. It does not have to. One question tightens around Lea and around everyone still trying to make rent inside that building: Para kanino ba talaga ang “development” na ito? Who is this development actually for?

Drawn from a fight happening now

Kanibal did not come from nowhere. Iloilo City spent 2026 arguing about its public markets — vendors displaced from long-held puwesto by redevelopment, a strict city crackdown on transient vendors, the bolanteros, selling outside the newly modernized facility, and unresolved questions about the turnover and management of the market buildings themselves. The city has defended modernization as the path to better, safer markets. Vendors’ groups and other sectors have asked a narrower question: who gets to still be there when the renovation is done?

That is the tension the film builds its horror out of. In one production still, a tarp hangs in the background of Lea’s stall reading MODERNISASYON ANG SOLUSYON! — modernization is the solution. It is not framed as a joke. It is framed the way such banners actually appear in a market: laminated, official, hung above people who were not asked.

Baylon, who is also an activist and a member of Kabataang Artista para sa Tunay na Kalayaan (KARATULA) at UP Visayas, does not leave the connection to be inferred. In the director’s statement video released with the film, he names it outright.

“Kailangan mapanood nating lahat ang Kanibal, dahil hindi lang naman ito isang pelikula — ito ay nagkakalampag din ng mga kampanyang masa, katulad ng mga kampanya ng ating mga manininda o bolantero sa siyudad ng Iloilo.”

(We all need to watch Kanibal, because this isn’t just a film — it also makes noise for mass campaigns, like the campaigns of our vendors and bolanteros in the city of Iloilo.)

He is careful, in the same statement, about what the film is not arguing. “Hindi naman tayo tutol sa mga development,” he says — we are not against development — “pero isa lang ang tanong natin sa pelikulang ito.” We only have one question in this film. The film’s own title card answers it with another question: Para kanino nga ba ang pribatisasyon?

His written statement in the press kit puts the same charge in flatter terms.

“Ginagawang negosyo ang mga pampublikong serbisyo na dapat nagsisilbi sa sambayanan. Kaya sa panahon na patuloy nang nalalantad ang mga anomalya, korapsyon, at inhustisya ng ating gobyerno, kinakailangan natin ng mga pelikula katulad nito — mga pelikulang nagpapakita ng tunay na kondisyon at nagpapalakas ng mga panawagan ng masang api.”

(Public services that ought to serve the people are being turned into business. So at a time when the anomalies, the corruption, and the injustice of our government keep coming to light, we need films like this — films that show the real conditions and that amplify the calls of the oppressed.)

‘Walang pekeng karne’

The behind-the-scenes photographs from the shoot are, in their way, as telling as the stills. A young crew crowds a wet market aisle with a monitor and a boom, negotiating for space between hanging carcasses and the blue plastic and yellow-painted posts of a real palengke. In one frame, three crew members grin over a table of prosthetic viscera, hands red to the wrist. In another, Baylon sits on an overturned crate beside an older vendor and a small boy, talking — not directing, listening. In several, real shoppers and real vendors are simply there, going about the day around a film that is being made about them.

The meat, Baylon says, was the film’s main element, in nearly every shot — and none of it was faked. “Walang pekeng karne,” he says. “Lahat talaga ng karne na ginamit namin ay fresh.” No fake meat; all of it fresh.

The statement video is candid about what that cost the production. Three words flash across the screen in sequence, in red: ALINGASAW. BAHO. AMOY. Stench, stink, smell. Someone on set is heard warning that a piece is about to turn — “Hala, malapit na ‘yang karne na ‘yan!” — and the video cuts to a title card that has evidently become a running joke: CHEF MICHAEL!

Baylon has compared the production to a dining table with far too many dishes to prepare, one that could not have been finished without everyone’s contribution. Amid the briny smell of the day’s catch, the scent of new harvest, the clatter of equipment, the shouting of vendors, and the noise of daily trade, he has said, the market became a living place of learning and of pakikipagkapwa — of being with others — that shaped a film meant to give voice to communities that are too often ignored.

The team has carried the conceit all the way through its publicity. The director’s statement video is structured as a five-course meal: I. Ang Putahe. II. Ang Aral. III. Ang Mapait na Proseso. IV. Ang Paboritong Sangkap. V. Ang Tikiman. The dish, the lesson, the bitter process, the favorite ingredient, the tasting. It closes on a title card that reads KAKAIN NA PO TAYO — let’s eat.

Producer Krizelle Kate Blanza frames the stakes for the audience rather than the crew.

“Naniniwala akong mahalagang suportahan ang mga pelikulang may tapang na maglahad ng mga kuwentong sumasalamin sa tunay na kalagayan ng masang api. Umaasa ako na sa pamamagitan ng Kanibal, marami ang mamumulat sa mga isyung kinakaharap ng ating mga manggagawa at maliliit na manininda.”

(I believe it’s important to support films brave enough to tell stories that reflect the true condition of the oppressed. I hope that through Kanibal, many will be awakened to the issues our workers and small vendors face.)

A Hiligaynon body horror

The film wears its genre openly — the statement video stamps the words HILIGAYNON BODY HORROR across the screen — and it is unusually forthcoming about where it comes from. Baylon’s stated influences run in two directions at once: Lino Brocka’s Insiang (1976), the foundational Philippine film of a woman ground down by the place she lives in, alongside Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023). Social realism and the transformed body, in the same lineage. The video’s own one-line description of the effect it wants: unsettling & bothering.

Asked for his favorite shot, Baylon does not pick a set piece. It is the last shot — and it was the first thing he thought of, before the rest of the film existed. He is willing to tease the result. “Feeling ko pag napanood niyo yung Kanibal, hindi niyo masyado i-expect yung ending,” he says, “pero syempre mapapaisip na lang kayo.” I think when you watch Kanibal you won’t quite expect the ending — but of course it’ll leave you thinking.

The filmmaker

Michael Baylon is entering his final year of a BA in Communication and Media Studies at UP Visayas, specializing in film and TV broadcasting, with prior work in technical and art direction on productions including Siga Suga (2025), The UPV Fair 2024, and Busalian Kang CAS 2025. That grounding shows in how Kanibal is put together — a filmmaker who has spent time behind the art department table thinking of the camera as both witness and instrument.

What he learned making it, he says, was a rule about where stories have to sit: “Yung mga kwentong pinapahiwatig at sinasabi natin sa mga pelikulang ginagawa natin ay dapat nakalubog sa masa.” The stories we imply and tell in the films we make must be submerged in the masses. Art, in his account, is not a mirror held up to that condition but a tool used on it — “isang makapangyarihang [instrument] para gamitin natin magpamulat sa mas malawak na masang Pilipino,” a powerful instrument to awaken the broader Filipino masses.

He puts the last word plainly, and it doubles as the film’s thesis: “Ito ay isang pelikula na ginagamit ang sining bilang armas kontra sa mga inhustisya.” This is a film that uses art as a weapon against injustice.

Kanibal is produced by Cine ni Mango Productions in co-production with Reelone Media and KARATULA, shot by cinematographer Kieth Earl Rebaño, designed by Aleona Gardose, edited by Doxford Perlas and Henri Dioval Candelario, and scored by Alexus Jan Yap, with the official soundtrack “Bumaya” by ALAB. JP Larroder rounds out the principal cast as Bobot.

For a film about a market, it is a fittingly crowded set of hands. Which is more or less the point. A palengke is not a building. It is the people the building was supposed to be for.

Kanibal (2026) — Philippines · Hiligaynon with English subtitles · 16:52 · 16:9 · Stereo. Official entry, Puregold CinePanalo Film Festival 2026, Shorts Category (Set A), September 23 – October 4, 2026.