By Prof. Sarah Raymundo
Women, Liberation , Empire
Timing matters. That Sisa, the newest film by Jun Robles Lana, arrives during Women’s Month is no accident. At a time when public discussions of women’s empowerment are often framed through lifestyle branding, corporate representation, or individual success stories, the film redirects attention to a more unsettling question: what does women’s liberation mean in a country shaped by colonial conquest and war?
The answer Sisa suggests is stark. In societies forged through domination, the emancipation of women cannot be separated from the struggle for national liberation. Any politics that isolates gender from structures of imperial power risks misunderstanding the conditions that produce women’s oppression.
Much of mainstream feminism today sidesteps this historical reality. It celebrates personal empowerment while leaving intact the global systems that generate exploitation, militarism, and dependency. Liberation is reframed as identity, career, or lifestyle — forms of empowerment that coexist comfortably with hierarchies sustaining imperial influence.
More troubling still is how women’s rights discourse has at times been mobilized to justify geopolitical intervention. Appeals to “save” women were central to the rhetoric surrounding the U.S.-backed campaign to destabilize Iran, portraying the country’s society as uniquely oppressive to legitimize foreign interference. Such discourse provided moral cover for military intervention and regime-change operations, turning feminist language into a tool of imperialism rather than genuine emancipation. In these instances, the ideals of women’s liberation are co-opted to serve the broader strategy of U.S. war of aggression and geopolitical control.
Sisa as Historical Intervention
Sisa cuts through this ideological fog by returning to the violent origins of modern Philippine history. Set in 1899, the film unfolds during the opening phase of the Philippine–American War, when the United States claimed to be liberating the Philippines from Spain while simultaneously suppressing the independence already declared by Filipino revolutionaries. What followed was not liberation but a devastating counterinsurgency marked by scorched-earth tactics: villages burned, crops destroyed, and civilians forcibly relocated to sever the revolutionary movement from its base.
Against this backdrop, Lana constructs a story that is both intimate and political. At its center is Hilda Koronel, whose commanding portrayal transforms one of Philippine literature’s most tragic figures into something far more dangerous: a woman who turns the appearance of madness into a weapon of resistance.
In Noli Me Tangere, Sisa collapses under the unbearable weight of colonial injustice, driven to insanity after losing her children to Spanish violence. Lana’s reimagining begins from the same premise—colonial brutality produces unbearable suffering—but takes a radically different turn. Madness here is not merely a symptom. It is a strategy.
Madness as Strategy
Sisa performs madness. Feigning insanity allows her to move beneath the notice of American officers. Behind the mask of delirium, she organizes quietly: building networks of trust, circulating information, and nurturing the fragile possibility of collective resistance in a community whose suffering has nearly extinguished hope.
The film hints that Sisa once belonged to the world of the zarzuela — a theatrical tradition that flourished during the early years of American rule. At the turn of the twentieth century, the zarzuela was more than entertainment. Beneath its music and melodrama, playwrights embedded critiques of colonial authority and nationalist aspirations that audiences readily understood. Performances often functioned as political gatherings disguised as theater.
For someone formed within this milieu, performance was never purely aesthetic. It was a political technique. Sisa’s feigned madness thus becomes an extension of theatrical craft: a role played with precision to outmaneuver power
Compromise, Capitulation, and Contemporary Politics
Yet the obstacles Sisa confronts are not limited to the occupying army. Colonial domination thrives on division, dramatized through characters who embody different forms of compromise.
Two paths emerge alongside Sisa’s resistance, embodied in Leonor and Artemio Ricarte. Leonor, portrayed with unsettling ambiguity by Jennica Garcia, seeks survival within the colonial order. Bound to an American officer in a relationship resembling sexual servitude, she comes to believe in the promise of imperial emancipation, mistaking submission for liberation. Her tragedy is the personal, gendered dimension of colonial power: the intimate entanglements through which domination reproduces itself.
Ricarte, portrayed by Romnick Sarmenta, embodies a more public, supposedly principled compromise. He argues that the Americans cannot yet be defeated and that resistance must be postponed, framing delay as strategic prudence. Yet Lana presents this as a subtle critique of political cynicism: by deferring confrontation, Ricarte abdicates responsibility to the community, leaving ordinary people exposed.
The tension these characters reveal extends beyond history. Ricarte exemplifies a recurring pattern in political movements: self-styled elites or opposition forces perform “acceptable” dissent — criticizing corruption or oppression rhetorically — but avoid challenging the structures that sustain it, claiming the timing is not right. In the contemporary Philippine context, this can mean opposition forces tacitly shielding the country’s topmost leadership, whose authority is bolstered and protected by the United States, under the guise of prudence.
In contrast, Sisa refuses any illusion of safety or postponement. Where Leonor seeks survival and Ricarte excuses delay, she acts decisively, organizing the community even under the most desperate circumstances. Lana uses this contrast to dramatize a broader principle: emancipation — whether from colonial oppression, systemic injustice, or contemporary complicity — requires confronting power in the present, not deferring action to some hypothetical “right time.” The moral and political stakes of hesitation are made vivid, and Sisa’s courage illuminates the dangerous path that true resistance demands.
Echoes of Balangiga
The film’s most striking historical resonance appears in its echo of the Balangiga Massacre. Popular memory often focuses on the American retaliation that followed the uprising in Samar, when Jacob H. Smith ordered his troops to turn the island into a “howling wilderness.” That command — and the atrocities it unleashed—has become one of the most infamous episodes of the Philippine–American War.
What receives far less attention is the act of Filipino resistance that preceded it. In Balangiga, peasants used deception and performance as tactical tools. Ordinary activities — including a wedding ceremony — were staged to conceal the mobilization of fighters. Under this cover, they launched a coordinated attack that killed more than eighty American soldiers.
It was not an impulsive uprising but a carefully organized act of anti-colonial warfare. Through deception, popular participation, and intimate knowledge of the terrain, a poorly armed community defeated a better equipped occupying force. The episode is an early example of guerrilla warfare rooted in popular protection. Decades later, similar principles would inform the strategy of people’s war practiced by the communist New People’s Army, yet the logic was already evident in early twentieth-century struggles.
Sisa evokes this forgotten dimension of Balangiga in its climactic sequence. Under Sisa’s covert leadership, the town stages a collective act of resistance. What appears to be resignation becomes preparation; what looks like submission conceals strategy. The villagers ultimately poison an entire American garrison along with Filipino collaborators.
The moment is chilling not because the film glorifies violence but because it reveals the grim calculus of colonial war. Revolution, the film suggests, is never an abstract slogan. It is a series of decisions made under conditions where every option carries moral cost
Class, Contradiction, and Historical Continuity
By the final act, Sisa confronts a dilemma that mirrors the contradictions of revolution itself. Different characters embody competing tendencies—collaboration, hesitation, opportunism, and resistance. These tensions resemble the conflicting interests of social classes, particularly the unstable position of the petty bourgeoisie, which can tilt toward revolution or accommodation.
Sisa’s decisions become an allegory for resolving such contradictions: not through moral purity, but through political commitment.
Seen alongside Barber’s Tales (2013), Lana’s historical scope becomes even more striking. That earlier film depicted a rural community awakening politically during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., as ordinary villagers gradually engaged in underground resistance. If Barber’s Tales portrays the persistence of revolutionary traditions in the twentieth century, Sisa returns to the colonial crucible where those traditions were first forged. Both films share the same premise: history is not made by heroes alone, but by communities of ordinary people confronting extraordinary circumstances.
Near the end of Sisa, this premise crystallizes. The town gathers under the shadow of occupation, and for a brief moment the weight of empire seems overwhelming. Yet in that moment the villagers act — not because victory is certain, but because submission has become impossible. The scene recalls Elsa in Himala, portrayed by Nora Aunor, who declares: “Walang himala. Ang himala ay nasa puso ng tao.” In Lana’s film, the insight takes on flesh and blood: there are no miracles from above, and yet the people — women most of all, refusing submission and organizing in the face of empire — create one themselves. #
