Padamlágan is a powerful and necessary exploration of memory, political fracture, and the desperate, unwavering nature of a father’s love.
Director Jenn Romano, from Canaman, Camarines Sur, brings Philippine history to the screen with the 90-minute period drama, Padamlágan (Night Light).
Set in Naga in the fragile days leading up to the 1972 declaration of Martial Law, the film centers on a tragedy that simultaneously shattered a community and foreshadowed a nation’s darkest days: the collapse of the Colgante Bridge during the annual fluvial procession for Our Lady of Peñafrancia.
Doring watches in horror as the bridge collapses and bodies plunge into the water, devotion unraveling into chaos. Ivan was on that bridge. In the aftermath, Doring claws through wreckage, hospitals, and government offices, searching relentlessly for his son. But the system is broken: hospitals overwhelmed, records lost, officials indifferent. Families cling to hope while whispers spread — not all the missing drowned; some disappeared into something far darker.
Five days later, Martial Law is declared, silencing grief and cementing the unresolved. Doring’s search becomes not only a father’s desperate act of love but also a mirror of a nation’s haunting loss, one that lingers in memory and archives, unresolved, unforgotten.
When Martial Law was declared, it silenced the public’s grief and cemented the fate of the missing as “unresolved.”
Cast includes Ely Buendia, Esteban Mara, and Sue Prado. Maria Elena Catajan
