Jeepney Radio
Audience award, Archipelago Film Week 2026. Official selection, Nocturne Shorts Week 2026. Official selection, Ridgeline Film Festival 2026.
The programmer's note
A staff pick since May, and the film we put on when a programme needs air in it. Ilagan is a musician and the song choices are doing structural work: each one tells you who is in charge, and the cut back to Bong's face tells you what it is costing him. Watch the taho vendor's coup, which is staged like a heist. It is the only film here that has made a room applaud twice.
The film
Bong has driven the Cubao to Quiapo route for nineteen years and has never once let anybody touch the radio. On the morning of his birthday, for reasons he regrets almost immediately, he announces a rule: the passenger nearest the front controls the dial, and the rule holds until that passenger gets off. The route becomes a study in shifting government, conducted at volume. A student puts on a ballad. A vendor with four buckets of taho stages a coup by sitting down very fast. Two nuns take the front bench and hold it for eleven blocks. Ilagan shoots the entire film from inside the vehicle, mostly off the driver's mirror, so you watch a democracy form and collapse in a space two metres wide. Traffic is a character. So is the particular Manila sound of a jeepney engine idling with a love song laid over the top of it. The last passenger is the joke, and also not the joke.
