The race after EdJop

Last Saturday night, my daughter Parvane Mae and I finally watched Edjop. I had written about the film before seeing it, so there was always the danger that I had prepared myself too much — that the actual movie would arrive after I had already built one in my head. Thankfully, I was not disappointed. We cried more than once. We talked afterward. And somewhere between Elijah Canlas becoming Edgar Jopson and Jodi Sta. Maria running through the unfinished business of a daughter with her father, history stopped being a chapter again. It became personal.

The timing made the experience even more unsettling. We watched Edjop in the very days when the country remembers the declaration and implementation of Martial Law in September 1972. More than half a century later, here we were — a father who grew up much closer to that history and a daughter who inherited it — watching one family’s story unfold on screen. The calendar made the film feel less like a look backward and more like a conversation with the present.

That, for me, is where Edjop works best. It does not ask us to meet only the activist whose name appears in histories of the First Quarter Storm and Martial Law. It asks us to meet Ed: son, husband, father, Atenean, organizer, reformist, revolutionary, and complicated human being. The historical Edjop began as an advocate of institutional reform before eventually joining the underground movement as repression intensified. The film lets that transformation unfold through conversations, disagreements, fear, love, and sacrifice rather than reducing it to a political label. The material accompanying the film similarly describes its story as being shaped by memories of people who knew him rather than as a conventional documentary reconstruction.

I particularly loved the conversations. Some were sharp, some tender, some uncomfortable. At different moments, people argue about dialogue, civil disobedience, organization, reform, armed struggle, and how far one should go when institutions no longer seem capable of delivering justice. This is where the film becomes more interesting than a simple hero story. The historical Jopson was once a moderate NUSP leader who believed in incremental change; his politics later radicalized. We can understand that journey without pretending that every conclusion he reached must therefore become ours.

That distinction matters. You do not have to become a communist to care about the society Edjop dreamed of. You do not have to follow his exact road to fight your own battles against injustice. Activism can happen in a courtroom, classroom, newsroom, laboratory, barangay hall, hospital ward, fishing community, the streets, or a voting booth. It can mean organizing. It can also mean refusing corruption, defending somebody being bullied, doing research that actually helps people, treating the poor with dignity, or simply doing your profession well when cutting corners would be easier. The question the film left me was less “Would I have chosen Edjop’s path?” and more “What am I doing with the path available to me?”

Perhaps that is why watching it beside my daughter mattered so much. She is a member of Gen Z and a physician. Her 11 years at Ateneo had already given her a strong sense of history, made even more personal by the deeper conversations and campaigns of the 2022 elections. But Edjop brought that history closer. Martial Law is something she inherited rather than lived through, and the film gave it faces, voices, choices, and consequences. Like Joyette, younger Filipinos are trying to make sense of a past they did not personally witness.

And I hope Parvane carried something else out of the theater: a deeper reason to take medicine seriously as active public service. Her activism need not look like Edjop’s. She has patients instead of protest lines. Her battles may be against illness, unequal access to care, exhausted families, and the consequences of poor or corrupt governance that too often fall hardest on ordinary people. There is something quietly radical about insisting that another person’s life deserves care simply because that person is human. A more humane society is built not only in the streets but wherever people refuse to become indifferent to injustice and suffering.

I also loved the running metaphor. Joyette is an athlete, and the film keeps returning to running as memory, avoidance, endurance, and eventually inheritance. One of its most beautiful ideas is the multi-loop: remembering requires going back in order to move forward. Then comes the relay. You do not run alone; somebody carries the baton, passes it, and another person continues. That image stayed with me. Perhaps history works like that. We inherit unfinished races. But inheriting the baton does not require us to run exactly as the previous runner did. Every generation must decide what is worth carrying forward, what needs questioning, and where its own finish line should be.

The cast gives those questions flesh. Elijah Canlas makes Edjop intense without turning him into marble, while Jodi Sta. Maria gives Joyette’s distance, anger, and eventual reckoning emotional weight. The film also stirred my own Ateneo memories. I spotted familiar faces, including Ron Capinding, whom I knew from our JBEC days in the early 2010s, and Erin Tañada, another Atenista. The Ateneo connection runs deep through Edjop’s story, especially the formation toward social justice and becoming a person for and with others. But that formation matters only when it leaves the campus and reaches people beyond our familiar circles. I hope Philippine cinema continues telling stories of activists from the laylayan — farm workers, fisherfolk, laborers, Indigenous communities, and countless others whose struggles helped shape our history even if their names never entered our textbooks.

There are moments when the dialogue pushes its message rather firmly. One review of the film similarly observed that some lines can feel overly explicit, even while arguing that accessibility was part of the filmmakers’ intention. I can live with that. What I appreciated more was that Edjop allowed politics to collide with family. Every noble-sounding word — struggle, sacrifice, revolution, country — eventually lands somewhere painfully ordinary: a worried wife, a frightened mother, a child growing up without a father. The cost of conviction is not paid only by the person who chooses it.

So yes, after finally seeing Edjop, I hope more people watch it. The discounted ticket price helps, and I hope there will be more block screenings, especially for schools. But I would not bring students merely to tell them what political conclusion they should reach. Bring them to ask questions. Let them argue afterward. Let them examine the reformist and revolutionary positions presented in the story, check the history, read other accounts, disagree respectfully, and ask what justice requires of them today. The historical record confirms Jopson’s evolution from student reformist to underground activist; understanding why that happened is more educational than reducing him to either saint or villain.

I entered the cinema having already written about Edjop. I left realizing that I still had more to ask about Ed — and about myself. My daughter probably did, too. Perhaps that is enough reason to see the film. Good historical cinema does not have to hand us identical answers. Sometimes its best work begins when the credits end, when a father and daughter walk out of the theater wiping their eyes and continue talking on the way home.

Edjop’s race ended long ago. Ours has not. The baton is already in our hands. What we do with it is up to us.

***

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 that employ him or with which he is connected.