Katips is lead by the young actor Jerome Ponce and Nicole Asencio. It is refreshing to see Jerome in a musical film partner with equally talented singer songwriter Nicole Asencio that also shines in this film showing her Broadway like performance. The film is like watching a play with beautiful songs that is well integrated in each scenes. Mon Confiado, Dexter Doria and the rest of the cast delivers decent performance justifying their role in this historical musical film.
“Katips: Mga Bagong Katipunero” was originally performed onstage in the year 2016; winning the ALIW Awards for Best Musical Performance that year, Vince Tañada, the writer, director and producer of the film believes that sharing the story of students fighting for freedom in the middle of a force too big for them to control would be a timely metaphorical representation about our society today as we fight against the menace that continues to eat at our freedom as human beings.
The play was written with the help of a historian to make sure the chronological accuracy of events is given justice. Vince supports against history revisionism as a parasitic fiber that continues to gnaw at society today, especially the young. As a movie, the screenplay has undergone a revamp without affecting the narrative. He did this to make sure that the film remains neutral in its political stand and only continues as a statement of facts about the realities from the 70s until the latter 80s through the eyes of fictional students who might have very well been real people in the guise of different names.
The film was shot using various styles. Since it’s a musical, this is incomparable to any other historical musicals that has ever been done in the country so far. Using pseudo-realistic techniques and metaphors, the movie is an exploration on how vast a filmmaker can make use of music, lights, costumes, visual effects and symbolisms in order to deliver a story as poignant and as life-changing as reality, experienced first-hand will be for viewers.
Synopsis of Katips
When his University of the Philippines Professor was abducted by the government-controlled Metropol during a demonstration of different groups in the mountainside that was Mendiola, Greg, a medical student and the leader of the National Union of Students in the Philippines (NUSP), along with other freedom fighting groups stood their ground and began a vigil until the Metropol came back and used force to subdue the protest. Despite the blood and gore, the burning desire for freedom grew within the hearts of those who were brutally subjugated. But their fight did not stop there.
In a safehouse aptly named the “Katips House” owned by Alet, a 30-year-old activist, we are introduced to Panyong, a subversive writer for the underground newspaper, “Ang Bayan”, and other characters that keep the fight for freedom. After the Declaration of the Martial Law, during a strike for the welfare of workers, two other students were seized; Art, a freshman student and photographer to the school paper and Estong, leader of the worker’s union. Soon after, Alet was also snatched and all three were separately tortured and became part of the statistics of desaparecidos, the unaccounted radicals branded as insurgents during the days when the Writ of Habeas Corpus was no longer in effect. When the decaying corpse of Alet was found beside a ditch in a far-flung area in Bulacan, the fight for freedom took Greg and Panyong to the mountains for safety, while Lara looked after the Katips Home, she was a former New York actress who just recently took up the cause after learning that her father, Greg’s captured professor, was killed by no other than the government she used to idolize.
Years pass, and during the heat of the Edsa Revolution, a news article revealed to Lara about the death of two rebels during an encounter, she was tearfully surprised when an injured Greg arrives and informs her that he was somehow spared and only Panyong was slayed at gunpoint. The couple made a tearful reunion and it was only then that Greg found out that he has a son; only making his homecoming all the more bittersweet.
Several decades later, in the grand opening of the Bantayog ng mga Bayani, a memorial to the fallen of the Martial Law, the characters of the movie meet once more; those that survived, and it is revealed that the movie is a book memoir of no other than an aged Panyong as a call for unity of a people still wanting of a freedom that is always beyond their grasp.
Watch below as the cast share their share their fond moments and take us behind the scenes in filming Katips
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| Jerome Ponce |
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| Nicole Asencio |
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| Jerome Ponce & Vince Tañada |
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| Dexter Doria & Mon Confiado |
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| Carla Lim & Johnrey Rivas |
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| Joshua Bulot & Vean Olmedo |
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| OJ Arci |
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| Afi Africa |
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| JP Lopez |
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