HOW THE PAST AND PRESENT CONVERSE IN ‘CINEMARTYRS’

Since at least 2005, experimental filmmaker Sari Dalena has conceived Cinemartyrs like a mother would a child. After countless rejections and revisions, 2025 is just about the perfect time for its delivery.

- By JOKER MANIO

The cast of Cinemartyrs shooting in Intramuros.

“The 20 years of waiting is a healing process,” Sari says to Young STAR over video call. “But at the same time, marami palang elements na kailangang mag-align.”

And the stars did align as Sari’s grit bore her the Best Director award in this year’s Cinemalaya Film Festival, two decades after she first pitched her initial concept for the festival’s inaugural year. Cinemartyrs also won the Special Jury Award for Full-Length Film.

Young STAR uncovers the process of making Cinemartyrs with Sari and leading star Nour Hooshmand.

Sari based Cinemartyrs on her experience making her first full-length experimental documentary, Memories of a Forgotten War (2001), about the forgotten massacres of the Philippine-American War. But to look at the film as a mere reconstruction of her ordeals is selling it short.

The decades since Memories of a Forgotten War have provided Dalena with a wealth of reflection. She emphasized the responsibility of the filmmaker in recreating war traumas, since she experienced its consequences and how it can harm the subjects she was supposed to serve. This guilt is foregrounded in Cinemartyrs.

“Reckoning is a heavy word,” Sari muses.

She reaffirms, however, her resolve in conversing with history through film. “Yung paglabas ng pelikula ngayon, may kinalaman din siya sa nangyayari sa Gaza,” Sari says. “The genocide is mirroring. I wanna amplify that the horrors of war are happening again and again and again.”