The key to grasping Katski Flores’ Edjop, I believe, lies in the phrase that closes the film’s opening sequence: “Inspired by memories of real events.” Edjop is not a straightforward biopic of Edgar Jopson, the legendary student activist and rebel leader of the Martial Law era. Nor is it docufiction; the film takes deliberate creative liberties to embody authentic emotional truths rather than rigid historical accuracy. As Flores noted of her collaboration in the writing of the screenplay with Jade Castro, they both worked on the recollections of Jopson’s family and friends, and the film retells events from their perspectives.
Edjop is a non-linear tale told in two timelines. The first anchors us in the present with his daughter, Joyette Jopson (Jodie Sta. Maria), a triathlete competing in an Arctic marathon.
She is constantly asked to join memorials and events recalling the horrors of Martial Law, a period in which her father is a key figure of, but Joyette actively resists. Her athleticism, her running, is a metaphorical running away from his legacy.
Yet she is haunted by the stories of him and these form the second timeline of the film, as it recounts her father, Edgar Jopson (Elijah Canlas) as he becomes a student activist during the First Quarter Storm of the early 1970s into a full-blown underground communist rebel, on the run from the Marcos regime. Through this converging tracks, Joyette embarks on a journey to reconcile her father’s disappearance and come to terms with myth of a man she never truly knew.
The film is not just marked by its two converging timelines, and I say converging because Flores and Castro write this film as if the past and present are entangled with each other; no easy feat. The two halves of Edjop could not be more different. The present-day scenes are shot on a mounted camera, mostly static, with Joyette framed in large, wide-open spaces. She is a woman burdened by the weight of the past.
The flashbacks, the scenes set in the past detailing her father’s activist life are shot handheld, packed with extreme close-ups. The pacing is fast-paced and thrilling. The charge of revolution vibrates through every scene, causing the two worlds to collide at every cut. Editor Benjamin Tolentino does an excellent job pacing the film, making its two-hour runtime fly by. So much is happens as we are pounded by historical events, yet it never feels aimless or drawn out.
Sta. Maria and Canlas serve as excellent foils for the audience, standing as polar opposites of each other. Sta. Maria’s Joyette is dealing with an internal struggle, her conflict simmers just underneath her facial expressions, in her posture and gait, and in the quiet nuance delivery of her lines. On the other hand, Canlas is vibrant and larger-than-life.
His Edjop, the nickname of Edgar Jopson, is a character told from the collective memories of the people, friends, and family, demands a much larger canvas, and Canlas paints on it brilliantly. We also watch him evolve from an idealistic student activist into a full-blown underground rebel balancing family life, with his portrayal of the man shifts as the film leaps across timelines. It is exquisite work, really.
Edjop feels big; it feels epic. Flores and cinematographer Neil Daza deliver excellent visual coverage, allowing the camera full freedom to capture the vast breadth of each scene. And we leap seamlessly from past to present, sweeping across Luzon, Mindanao, and Norway, moving from street rallies to a quiet town fiestas, and into the brutal chaos of a demolition job. This is a big movie that fully realises the ambitious scope of what it is trying to say.
There are a few too many moments where the script takes a heavy-handed approach to Edjop’s dialogue. It gets a little too preachy at times, constantly dropping nuggets of wisdom clearly designed to encapsulate the things we need to take away from the film. Then again, this is all based on the memories of the people who remembered him. Ultimately, Edjop is meant for a specific audience: those who have forgotten, or perhaps never truly knew about the specifics of what really happened during the Martial Law era and the Marcos dictatorship.
This is a big movie making big swings at any form of historical revisionism. It speaks about our history, reminding us of our heritage of fighting back whenever the system is turned against us. We all know about the EDSA Revolution, but films like Edjop exist to remind us that countless battles were fought long before the people finally surged onto EDSA. The film shows us precisely how we got there and also what sacrifices were made along the way. This is part of our history, and this movie asks us to never forget.
My Rating: 4 Stars
Anchored by magnificent performances from Elijah Canlas and Jodie Sta. Maria, Edjop is an essential big-screen experience. It is a technical triumph and an urgent piece of Philippine cinema that refuses to let history fade. Check out the latest showtimes here and catch it in theaters nationwide.
