Quezon

As the Philippines prepares for independence from American rule, suave, smooth-talking politician Manuel Quezon ascends to presidential office through persuasion and propaganda. With irreverence and biting wit, Quezon dissects a myth, revealing the timeless thirst for power animating a hallowed historical figure.

Philippines, 1935. Manuel “Casey” Quezon has been elected president on the back of a shrewd campaign, a pliant press and a series of propaganda films. Disillusioned by this Machiavellian figure that he once supported, newspaperman Joven watches an alternate version of the propaganda movies that Nadia, his filmmaker daughter, has secretly assembled, offering a different image of the beloved president. 

In Quezon, Jerrold Tarog paints a piercing satirical portrait of the fabled Filipino politician described by his foes as an “unscrupulous chameleon”. With cynical wit and unflagging energy, the film unveils the charade and chicanery behind Quezon’s rise, but also his tremendous charisma and enterprising spirit. Narrating Quezon’s story as a film-within-a-film, Tarog adopts a dialectical approach, underlining cinema’s dubious role in political mythmaking while also inviting us to reflect on the counter-myth his own film constructs. 

With a cast including Jericho Rosales and Iain Glen, Quezon marks the third installment in Tarog’s Bayaniverse trilogy of well-received historical dramas. The film traces the transition of Filipino political history from an age of idealism to one of unchecked opportunism, but its diagnosis resonates all the more in our era of pervasive personality cults and nihilist power-grabbing.

– Srikanth Srinivasan

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