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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Tuesday, October 28, 2025

entry arrow8:54 PM | Reading 'Quezon' Between the Lines



Since Jerrold Tarog’s Quezon came to movie screens everywhere last October 15, the debates it has initiated have been fruitful, but also wild. Is the film respectful or disrespectful of its subject matter? Shouldn’t the family have been consulted? Where are the merits of Quezon’s presidency in the film? What’s history and what’s fabulation? Should heroes remain on pedestals, or should they be brought down to our level? The simmering discourse finally erupted when a Quezon descendant took the director and his actor, Jericho Rosales, to task during a recent post-screening Q&A, accused them of being reckless and unfair, and dropped his mic in a dramatic huff. No one has exactly the same take on the film, although everyone has suddenly become an armchair historian.

I do believe most of these questions could be answered if only people bothered to supplement their viewing with the book tie-in published by Anvil Publishing—Quezon: The Story Behind the Film. For example, for those who have penned defenses of Quezon by saying that the film used mostly American colonial sources, here’s a quote from screenwriter Rody Vera from the book: “We decided to use Carlos Quirino’s Quezon: Paladin of Philippine Freedom as our template, which was by far the least hagiographical of [all the books we’ve read for our research] and covers a lot more detail that probably even other books might have referenced.” That’s hardly an American colonial reference.

The book is a small tie-in volume to Tarog’s long-awaited conclusion to his “Bayaniverse” trilogy, but I think it is more than just a supplement; it can create real conversations. Because everything you want to know or have questions about the film—the intent, the quarrels, the historical liberties, the controversies brewing in the echo chambers of Facebook, X, and Reddit—are all here, in the quiet candor of words. Here you will find the story of the film laid bare, and its intentions illustrated—all our myths about heroes, all our compulsions, all our complicities.

The book has nine parts, including an introduction by the historian John Ray B. Ramos; a producer’s notes written by Daphne O. Chiu-Soon; a message from the director which he had sent to every preview screening in the country; a section on movie stills and photos; a timeline of Manuel Quezon’s life, career, and legacy; a list of key references for those who demand historiographical integrity; and a timeline references—all very helpful, of course. But reading the book, I was more drawn to two specific sections of the film’s making: Rody Vera’s screenwriter’s notes, and an extensive interview with Jerrold Tarog, where he lays bare his intentions in making the film, his struggles in crafting it, and his hopes over what audiences might finally get from the story.

Vera’s essay reads like a confession. “Adapting into film the life story of any historical figure requires focus,” he writes. “It’s like confronting a huge slab of stone, the stone being the whole life of the real person, and chiseling away what is irrelevant.” It’s the best image anyone has ever written about screenwriting. You cannot put everything about your subject matter in the film! And as metaphors go, you realize it’s also how nations are made—chiseled, curated, reduced to fit the narrative of convenience.

Quezon, in hindsight, is less the hagiography we were taught in history class [if at all] and more an excavation of the man who shaped the architecture of our political soul. The screenwriter recalls reading Recah Trinidad’s ominous line from Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People: “Quezon laid the groundwork and the precedence for the declaration of Martial Law and the establishment of dictatorship by Ferdinand Marcos in 1972.” That realization, Vera says, became the film’s premise for him—and you can feel the pulse of that realization on every scene.

What the film does quite well, and so with this book, is restore nuance to a figure we have long turned into a statue. In Tarog’s story, Quezon is not just the dashing Commonwealth president of gargantuan monuments and of cities and provinces named after him—he is also the cunning tactician who invented our brand of politics: cronyism as governance, charm as statecraft, charisma as national hypnosis. “It was thrilling,” Vera admits in his essay, “to apprehend that while Filipinos were given the opportunity toward attaining self-rule in a colonial setup, socio-political criticism was never lagging behind.” That observation hums like both celebration and elegy.

Tarog’s own message reads like a director’s meditation on faith—faith in cinema, faith in conversation, faith in the possibility of understanding history through art. “The whole idea behind this trilogy,” he notes, “is the exploration of the concept of Bayani.” Then, in one perfect passage, he writes: “We are removing them from their statues, from the giant monuments erected for them, and we are bringing them down to our level as humans.”

It’s a mission statement that could also describe what this small book achieves. The pages strip Quezon, Luna, and Goyo of their mythic varnish and leave us with the humans underneath—flawed, luminous, sometimes monstrous, always Filipino. Tarog insists: “History is a series of events where good people do good things, good people do bad things, bad people do bad things, and bad people do good things.” That sentence, simple as it is, might be the most honest distillation of the Filipino condition.

And yet, the essays in the book are not content to stay in the archives of the past. They hold a mirror up to our present. “If you read books about Quezon,” Tarog tells Anvil in the interview that rounds off the collection, “it feels like you’re reading about what’s happening now.” It’s true. Every page feels like déjà vu—political strongmen, moral gymnastics, the endless pageant of power and spectacle. When Tarog says, “It’s only a democracy in name, not in practice,” you can almost hear the sigh of an entire country.

The brilliance of film [and book] is that it refuses to simplify. Vera’s notes brim with self-awareness: “Is Quezon’s story therefore an allegory? Allegory, I guess, in this case is pointless. I think the film is more of an ‘origin’ story, that helps us understand why we are what we are as a nation.” To read this is to realize that every nation is, in fact, a genre film—revised, reshot, rebooted by every generation, with the same plot: a people trying to become a people.

The book also delves into the struggles of the film’s making. In Tarog’s interview in the book, you can sense exhaustion in his answers, but also grace. He recalls how “it probably took me a year or more” to compile a timeline of Quezon, Osmeña, and Aguinaldo, threading through “more than fifty books.” He admits the film’s limitations: what had to be cut, what could never fit into two hours of cinema. “Honestly,” he says, “Quezon’s life is very complex to study. Every decade of his life has something interesting, something dramatic that could be turned into a film. So to do justice to Quezon’s story, it would have to be a miniseries.” That miniseries will probably never happen—but we can imagine one with the expanded universe of a national soul, a patient curation of thought and struggle, of humor and disillusionment.

Tarog’s honesty is disarming: “Maybe [Quezon] was the only guy we had back then, or maybe he was the only one who could win over everyone else.” That may also be the secret horror of Philippine history: that our heroes were often just the best players of terrible games.

For those still bracing for controversy—those who suspect Quezon will be accused, as Heneral Luna once was, of reflecting too much of the vagaries of our present politics—the answers are already here. “Viewers will always watch through their own lens,” Tarog reminds us. “Life is messy and complicated.” The film does not impose judgment, especially on its characters; the book reflects this. For Tarog, it simply presents, with startling clarity, the continuum of power we have chosen to inherit.

But what lingers most for me from the book are the quieter insights. Vera muses on the camera itself as a metaphor, since the beginnings of Philippine cinema is a vital touchpoint in Quezon: “[Cinema] is but merely a projection of how its producer wants to be perceived, how he wants the truth to be told.” The line could describe Quezon, or any politician, or any filmmaker, or all of us, caught between image and self. “Who was that Filipino politician,” he asks, “who once said: ‘Perception is real, the truth is not’?”

I like how the book serves as a good footnote to how we have viewed the film. It reminds us that the film is really about us—our appetites for heroes, our addictions to myths, our uneasy laughter in the face of impunity. Tarog writes, “Ideally, our action is in the real world, not in the comments section.” And maybe that’s the invitation the film, and its book, gives us: to step out of the comments section of our history, and into its pages.

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