There’s something unsettling about how “Quezon” forces us to look again at a man we thought we knew. The film doesn’t simply replay a chapter of history—it rebuilds it. And that’s where the argument begins: depiction, not duplication. Cinema is not a mirror of the past but a creative act of cultural production, one that refuses to bow to nostalgia or family myth-making.

Here, Manuel L. Quezon is not a sainted father of the nation. He is a charismatic and polished politician, a sharp strategist, and an eloquent dreamer who nevertheless finds himself constrained, compromised, and ultimately undone by the iron grip of US imperialism. The film’s power lies in how it chooses its historical fragments—crafting a vivid picture of the Philippines at a crossroads, caught between colonial dependency and the illusion of independence.

At its heart, “Quezon” is a film about contradictions: class power and vulnerability, heroism and complicity, idealism and opportunism. It draws strength from its willingness to expose not just its subject’s brilliance but also the colonial structure that shaped—and limited—him.

Scenes that shatter

There are moments in “Quezon” that move and stay with you long after the credits have rolled.

The first: Quezon campaigning in Laguna, his voice breaking as he chants for freedom, the crowd echoing him like a chorus of the nation’s own heartbeat.

The second: the haunting Bulacan parade for Emilio Aguinaldo—once an annual commemoration, now turned into a dark carnival of reckoning. People in black wave black flags; windows are shuttered; placards demand justice for Luna and Bonifacio. Then the banner drops: “Traydor.”  It is the chilling wrath of ordinary people standing bravely against impunity.

And finally: Quezon, weakened and dying, being wheeled into a chamber reserved for the terminally ill. He screams his own name in frustration—a desperate, defiant cry of identity. It is a moment of reckoning with his failures against the formidable measure of national sovereignty. History itself trembles. 

Rivals, mirrors, and shades of gray

The film’s portrayal of Quezon and Aguinaldo is strikingly nuanced. They are less heroes or villains than uneasy reflections of each other—ambitious men navigating the same treacherous terrain of colonial politics. Peasants resent Quezon for shutting down Aguinaldo’s farm. Aguinaldo predictably sides with American Governor Leonard Wood, while Quezon tries to outmaneuver him with calculated defiance.

And yet, Aguinaldo is not caricatured as a total monster. In a rare moment of grace, he spares a woman abandoned by Quezon (they were wed in an underground marriage once sanctified by the Katipunan). Aguinaldo refuses to humiliate her publicly—even when it would serve him politically. It’s a reminder that in the murky space between ideals and survival, even rivals retain a sense of dignity.

The journalist as conscience

What deserves attention, but has been overshadowed by debates over “historical accuracy” and “unfair depiction,” is perhaps the film’s most radical insight: the power of journalism to shape—or sabotage—revolutionary consciousness.

Enter Joven Hernando, a fictional reporter who challenges the false binary between pen and sword, having fought with the Katipuneros before witnessing the new American colonial order. In a striking scene, Hernando verbally indicts Quezon’s opportunistic politics. Quezon defends his compromises as necessary tactics toward independence. But Hernando, echoing Mao Zedong, poses the decisive question: Compromise for whose benefit? Para kanino?

It’s a moment that lays bare class contradictions. Quezon himself articulates the tension, revealing how the petit bourgeois—the educated middle class—can live comfortably within colonial subjugation, their politics inevitably entangled with compromise and corruption. Yet “Quezon” refuses to stop there. Through Hernando’s wife Carmen and daughter Nadia, it paints another picture: women who are not silent bystanders but active participants in the struggle for freedom. Their agency quietly eclipses the ornamental portrayals of Quezon’s and Osmeña’s wives, whose beauty and propriety are all that are expected of them.

Yesterday’s chains, today’s amnesia

Watching “Quezon” today, it’s impossible not to draw parallels between the past and our present. The film’s world knew US imperialism for what it was—a system that shaped every aspect of national life. Today, that clarity is rare. Corruption is reduced to a moral drama of good versus evil individuals, obscuring the systemic world order—unequal exchange and entrenched imperialist structures of dependency. Such thinking slides into toxic subjectivism and uncritical relativism, too slippery for meaningful critique.

Why did independence once feel so urgent—and now so abstract? In the 1930s, the Katipunan’s victory was still a living memory. Now, the dominant institutions—media, academia, church, government—have absorbed the US counterinsurgency narrative: that revolution is futile, that only “peaceful” reform can save us. The film quietly, but firmly, calls this bluff. Beneath the promise of stability lies elite violence and colonial continuity.

Jerrold Tarog’s “Quezon” rejects this false peace. It insists on historical materialism—a grounded, unsentimental view of how power operates at a critical moment. It reminds us that the unfinished revolution against imperialism, bureaucrat capitalism, and feudalism remains the task of our time.

Cinema as counter-history

In one of the film’s most reflexive moments, Quezon himself predicts that cinema will one day shape the nation’s story. The film takes that prophecy and turns it inside out. Quezon’s goddaughter Nadia shows how film can just as easily perpetuate lies as it can expose them—and he embodies that very contradiction.

Tarog and screenwriter Rody Vera seem acutely aware of this paradox. Their film is not a monument; it’s a provocation. It asks us to reconsider who gets to tell history and how those stories shape what we believe about our nation’s failure, freedom and future. 

“Quezon” doesn’t ask for our comfort—it demands our reckoning. It is, above all, a reminder that cinema, like revolution, is never neutral.

Sarah Raymundo is an assistant professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman-Center for International Studies and a member of the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan’s national executive board.

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