There is a cruel irony at the center of Katski Flores’ “Edjop.” Joyette Jopson, portrayed by Jodi Sta. Maria, spends much of the film trying to understand a father she barely knew, a man who had become, in her own formulation, more concept than parent. 

The film sets out to reverse that distance: to pull Edgar “Edjop” Jopson down from the monument, return him to his family, and make flesh of a name inherited from history.

Jopson was only 34 when he was killed in Davao City in September 1982. Joyette, the second of his three children with Gloria Maria “Joy” Asuncion, was then only 3. The big distance that the film tries to close is therefore not figurative, as most of what Joyette knows of him has to be inherited from other people. 

Yet after more than two hours, I left the cinema feeling that the film had performed the opposite transformation on Jopson’s politics. It humanizes the father, yes, but often turns the revolutionary into another kind of concept: courage, hope, sacrifice, love of country. Noble words all. But words broad enough to be emptied of the concrete convictions, conflicts and choices that made Jopson’s life extraordinary, and dangerous.

“Edjop” begins, unexpectedly, with running. In Norway, Joyette hurdles an endurance race while explaining the peculiar psychology of a multiloop course. You pass the same road again and again. The landscape looks familiar, but the runner changes.

In 2019, the real Joyette became the first Filipino woman to run a marathon in the Arctic and win the 78° North Marathon in Svalbard. This is where the film’s metaphor begins, in biography. 

It is an elegant metaphor for memory, inheritance and history. It is also, perhaps unintentionally, a description of the film’s structure. “Edjop” keeps looping back to Joyette just as her father’s political life begins to gather momentum. 

From returns to interruptions

The first returns are intriguing, and eventually become interruptions. By the middle stretch, the question is no longer why the daughter is in the movie but why the father keeps being displaced from a movie carrying his name.

To be fair, the filmmakers have never hidden this intention. The official description calls “Edjop” a “historical family drama,” and Flores has said she pitched it as not particularly “historically confrontational,” but as a reckoning with the past. 

That makes Joyette’s prominence a thesis, not an accident. Still, intention does not cancel consequence. A film may choose its lens, but viewers can wonder what disappears outside its frame.

And what disappears here is substantial.

Dramatic arc

The historical Edgar Jopson offers a dramatic arc that doesn’t need a screenwriter to be astonishing. He was an Ateneo de Manila student leader and a leading figure of the National Union of Students of the Philippines, initially identified with the “moderate” wing of the student movement. He confronted then President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. over the question of a third term; Marcos dismissed him as just “a son of a grocer.” (Jopson was the second of 12 children of Hernan and Josefa Jopson, who ran a supermarket in Manila.)

Jopson worked with labor unions, helped organize workers, entered the revolutionary underground, headed the Preparatory Commission for the National Democratic Front, survived arrest and torture, escaped military custody, and later went to Mindanao to study and work. 

According to Bantayog ng mga Bayani, he kept “learning and writing” there, developing insights into the region’s distinct history and conditions.

The multi-awarded journalist and author Benjamin Pimentel’s biography places Jopson on the Communist Party of the Philippines’ Central Committee by 1977. He had also helped prepare the La Tondeña workers’ strike, which was one of the first major open labor protests under martial law. 

“Edjop” touches many of these points. What it rarely provides is the connective tissue.

The great unanswered dramatic question is not simply what Jopson did, but why a reformist came to believe reform was no longer enough. What did he see in factories, picket lines, rural communities and state repression that altered his understanding of power? What arguments changed him? What did it cost him intellectually, not only emotionally, to cross from elite respectability into underground revolutionary work?

This is not a demand that the film endorse his politics. A biopic need not agree with its subject to make his beliefs intelligible. But a film about a revolutionary has to be curious about the revolution inside him. 

“Edjop.” too, often gives us the result of that transformation without fully dramatizing its process. We see the courage, but not always the analysis that produced it.

The martial-law setting can therefore feel less like the engine of the story than its backdrop. The film depicts repression, surveillance, detention and violence; it does not erase the brutality of the period. But the conditions that push Jopson from one form of struggle to another remain strangely generalized. He becomes universally admirable precisely because he is made less politically specific: a good man who cared for the poor, stood up to power, and loved his country.

All true. But incomplete.

Joyette’s story

Joyette’s story is not without value. There is genuine dramatic tension in a daughter discovering that the public knows her father more intimately than she does. Her resentment is understandable. A child does not experience “history”; a child experiences absence. The country may remember a martyr while the family remembers an empty chair.

Her mother, Joy, was also herself part of the underground. She shared the clandestine work and the long separations from their family. Edjop and Joy had three children: Noy, Joyette and Teresa “Risa” Lorena who was born months before Edjop’s death.

The widowed Joy later remarried another revolutionary, Romulo Kintanar, who became the father figure Joyette grew up with. Joyette’s estrangement from her biological father is not just simply in his absence but also in the presence of another one. 

Sta. Maria understands this contradiction beautifully. She plays Joyette without forcing reverence into the character before it is earned, and her physical commitment to her role gives the running metaphor tactile credibility. The issue is, not her performance, but the proportion.

The training, competitions and repeated returns to Joyette accumulate until her self-discovery begins to compete with Jopson’s political becoming. The ending makes the imbalance harder to ignore by updating us on Joyette’s continuing athletic life. In a film titled “Edjop,” it is difficult not to wonder why the final biographical aftertaste is about the daughter still running.

Running is the film’s most inspired formal idea — until the film explains it too much. At first, the crosscutting between Joyette’s endurance and Jopson’s increasingly perilous life creates productive friction. One body runs toward a finish line; another keeps moving because capture can mean torture or death. One race is chosen; the other is imposed by history.

But the metaphor is repeatedly verbalized until the images lose some of their power. The relay-race idea in the final act is moving: Those who came before may not reach the finish line, but they leave something to be carried forward. The problem is that the film remains hazy about the baton itself. What exactly is being passed — memory, hope, dissent, political commitment, service? The vaguer the answer, the easier it is for Jopson’s revolution to dissolve into inspirational language.

Film’s framing

The same problem appears in the film’s geography. Its nonlinear editing can be electric when montage, archival material and crosscutting collapse time. But some transitions are so lightly marked that history begins to float free of place. Mindanao, especially, arrives with too little texture for a region so consequential to Jopson’s later work. Other critics have similarly noted that Manila, Mindanao and Norway can register more as labels than as fully grounded landscapes.

This matters because politics happens somewhere. Labor organizing happens among workers with specific demands; underground work happens in communities shaped by local histories and power. If those details become generic countryside and generic resistance, the film does not merely simplify geography. It thins history.

The sharper criticism, then, is not that “Edjop” falsifies its central history, but that it selectively depoliticizes it. It does not deny Marcos-dictatorship repression. Instead, it chooses a family-centered, less confrontational route through material that is inherently political. 

Flores has been candid about that framing. The choice may make the story more accessible to a mainstream audience. It also exacts a price: The more palatable Edgar Jopson becomes, the less clearly we understand what made him radical.

The cast works hard against that thinning. Elijah Canlas, in particular, is extraordinary. His Edjop seems constantly to be processing the world around him. He can play the earnest student leader, loving husband, frightened captive, and committed underground figure without turning the transitions into mere costume changes. 

Even when the screenplay withholds political detail, Canlas suggests an interior life larger than the scene.

Kakie Pangilinan, in her film acting debut as the young Joy, is still rough around some edges, but there is promise in her restraint, particularly when fear and affection must coexist without speeches. The supporting cast, even in brief appearances, gives the film flashes of a larger world that I kept wishing it had stayed with longer.

The hardest question

That is what makes “Edjop” frustrating: Its best sequences prove that Flores and her collaborators know how to make history feel alive, through a face, a cut, archival footage, a family’s silence, a body moving through danger. The film can be tender without becoming soft. It can make running, of all things, speak meaningfully to political memory.

But when it approaches the hardest question — what, specifically, did Edgar Jopson come to believe was worth risking his life for? — it repeatedly pulls back.

To humanize a revolutionary is not to remove the revolution from him. His politics were part of his humanity — the product of what he saw, studied, argued over, feared, loved, and chose. A film does not have to celebrate all of his conclusions. It does have to let us encounter them.

Near the end, Jopson asks about fear’s effect on action: “Kung magpapadala tayo sa takot, paano tayo kikilos?”

That was the question I carried out of the cinema. “Edjop” wants us to remember. It wants the next generation to take the baton. It wants hope to survive the runner.

I wish it had trusted us with more of what the runner was actually running for.

Because memory without specificity can become ceremony. Hope without history can become slogan. And in trying so hard to rescue Edgar Jopson from being merely a concept to his daughter, “Edjop” sometimes makes him a concept for viewers all over again. CS

Hannah L. Tabunda is a journalism graduate of the University of the Philippines Diliman and a contributor to CoverStory. Her interests include feature writing, multimedia journalism, and “stories that explore people, culture, and lived experiences.” She also engages in such combat sports as karate, Muay Thai and boxing, and has taken up bouldering and top-rope climbing.