Tigkiliwi hits home

By Herman M. Lagon

I went to the fifth Iloilo screening of Tigkiliwi last Sunday afternoon, February 1, because a friend invited me, and because the title itself sounded like a dare. Rynshien Joy Olivete – a spirited colleague from Dakila Collective – invited me to come, and I did, partly out of support, partly out of curiosity, and partly because it was also the first day of National Arts Month, declared every February by Presidential Proclamation No. 683. That coincidence felt almost scripted: a film named after the lean season, screened on a month meant to honor the harvest of Filipino creativity. I walked in expecting a small, earnest local film. I walked out feeling I had been brought to places in myself that only Ilonggo stories, told in our own cadence, can reach.

Before the movie even begins, the word “tigkiliwi” already carries weight if you grew up hearing it. In the 1980s, I learned it the way many kids did – not from a dictionary, but from the tone adults used when rice was low, school supplies were delayed, and a small want quietly became a household mood. The term is often linked with the “dead season” or lean months – commonly around August – when harvest has ended and planting has not yet translated into food or income. Some sources trace it to “kiwi,” a Hiligaynon adjective for something askew or unbalanced, a lopsidedness that fits both economy and expression. That old memory became the lens through which I watched the film. Tigkiliwi is not only about being scared of the dark. It is about being hungry in daylight, and about how scarcity can tilt a person’s choices, face, and faith.

At heart, Tigkiliwi is a survival story told at child’s eye level. After losing their mother, two siblings must learn how to live in a rural community where help is never guaranteed and stories often arrive before facts. They drift toward an old woman surrounded by aswang rumors, and the film smartly lets that fear linger without rushing to explain it. What matters is how the children read the adults around them—kindness, neglect, and unspoken pain – and how they begin to feel safe in the quiet routines and steadiness of cacao grown, processed, sold, and shared. It is less about monsters and more about how fear, hunger, and love coexist during a hard season.

The film’s awards, by now, have already announced that it is not a small story staying small. At Puregold CinePanalo, Tigkiliwi earned the Jury Prize and several major awards, including Best Supporting Actress for Gabby Padilla and a tied Best Actor win for child performer JP Larroder, alongside writing honors for writer-director Tara Illenberger. It is now heading to Fantasporto in Portugal—a milestone that still feels quietly astonishing. An Ilonggo-made, Hiligaynon-language film will meet an international audience through subtitles, carrying its local voice far beyond home.

You feel early that Tara Illenberger trusts her audience. She does not spoon-feed fear. She lets dread build the way it builds in a barrio: through glances, gossip, and the kind of quiet that makes a child’s imagination run ahead of adults. The story’s aswang layer is familiar – especially to those of us who grew up with a relative who swore they saw something, or knew someone who knew someone, and so on. Yet the film does not treat folklore as a cheap trick. It treats it as a living social language – sometimes a warning, sometimes an excuse, sometimes a mask for deeper human troubles. The comedrama-horror mix works because the humor does not feel pasted on; it arrives the way laughter arrives in hard homes: as a survival reflex, a release valve, an Ilonggo shrug that says, “Amo ni, gani.”

One of the joys of this screening, for me, was seeing how the film honors places without turning them into postcards. The familiar corners of Iloilo and the province – like the 157-year-old National Cultural Treasures San Joaquin Church and Campo Santo cemetery – do not appear as tourism flex. They appear the way they appear in real memory: part sanctuary, part stage, part witness. The inclusion of Dinagyang Festival rehearsals and city scenes also lands well; it reminds viewers that festivals and foodfests exist alongside hardship, not separate from it. In many Ilonggo households, joy is not the opposite of struggle. It is what we practice while struggling. The film catches that tension without preaching about it.

Performance-wise, I found myself repeatedly leaning in, especially whenever the child was on screen. JP Larroder has that rare mix: timing, sincerity, and an ability to carry adult weight without sounding like a child reciting adult lines. He can deliver humor that lands, then pivot into silence that hurts. The presence of “Nay Pansay,” portrayed by Ruby Ruiz, also anchors the film; she is the kind of character Ilonggos recognize immediately – stern but not cruel, sometimes deliberate in her Hiligaynon, bruised by life but still oddly funny when she chooses to be. Gabby Padilla, meanwhile, shows why she has been cited: she plays restraint well, the kind of acting that does not announce itself but stays in the body. I also admit, with a smile, that I found the lawyer character, Atty. Maya, charming – “cute,” “geeky,” and “empowered” in the harmless way that keeps a heavy story from collapsing into pure bleakness. The comedy cues are timely, not intrusive, and for an Ilonggo audience, often painfully relatable.

About the ending: I had a sense, midway through, of where it might go. That is not an insult to the film. Many good stories allow you to anticipate the destination; the real measure is how you are brought there. In Tigkiliwi, the path matters more than the surprise. Even when you suspect what is coming, the film still manages to unsettle you – because it is not only plotting events; it is sketching a climate of fear, tenderness, and moral compromise. There are also character threads that do not close neatly. Instead of feeling like a mistake, the open-endedness felt intentional, like a gesture that tells the audience, “You live in this country too; you know what usually happens after the credits.” Some viewers will want firmer closure. Others will appreciate the space – the quiet invitation to talk about it on the walk to the car, or over batchoy, or in a comment section that will not be kind.

One detail worth highlighting, because it shows how small local cinema can carry multiple layers: Rynshien, aside from being Production Manager, also appears – by chance and necessity – as a sari-sari store tindera in the story. That casting detail is charming in the most grassroots way: a production person stepping into the frame because independent filmmaking often works like a barangay fiesta – everyone helps, everyone fills a gap, and somehow the table still looks full. It is also a reminder that art is labor. When we watch an Ilonggo film win awards, we often praise the director and actors (rightly). We forget the production team members who solve a hundred small problems no one sees, so the story can breathe.

The awards help explain why this film is traveling. Beyond the Jury Prize and acting wins at CinePanalo, it has been discussed in year-end lists and local film conversations that treat it as one of the stronger Filipino releases of 2025. The Portugal screening at Fantasporto is not only a trophy moment; it is a cultural moment. When a Hiligaynon film enters an international festival space, it does not only represent a director. It represents the validity of regional language, regional humor, regional pain, and the kind of rural truth that Manila-centered screens often treat as background decoration. It says: our stories do not need to be translated into Metro Manila to be understood by the world.

I left the cinema thinking about tigkiliwi as both season and metaphor. The lean months in the farm economy teach a quiet discipline: you plan, you stretch, you improvise, you wait—just like planting pechay (wink). That is also what local cinema does. It survives on patience, community, and stubborn craft. There is something fitting, almost poetic, that Tigkiliwi screened on the first day of National Arts Month. It felt like a reminder that art is not always a luxury of abundance; sometimes it is what people make when life is lopsided, and they refuse to let the story be told only by the powerful. If “tigkiliwi” is the season when smiles go askew, this film is proof that even an askew smile can still be human, still be funny, and still be brave enough to travel.

***

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.