Sisa

Best Screenplay, Directors’ Week, 2026 Fantasporto International Film Festival

In 1902, a lone, disheveled woman strays into the borders of a reconcentrado. With neither a name nor a memory, she’s branded by the residents as Sisa, a woman driven to madness. Yet the women and children of the camp cut just as tragic a figure; they are destitute widows and bereaved mothers forced to pander to the needs of their American captors. As the women bow under the weight of injustice, Sisa stirs in them a restlessness for violence paid in kind. But when murmurs of amnesty arise in the camp with the incoming arrival of the Taft commission, Sisa must contend with the hums of resignation to stoke her own fire of rebellion.

In SISA, director Jun Robles Lana (Barber’s Tales, SDAFF ‘14) portrays the everyday ravages of war and the mutual atrocities wrought by cyclical violence. But it is Hilda Koronel, the legendary star of Lino Brocka’s Insiang and Manila in the Claws of Night, who radiates with haunting conviction. In her first film in over a decade and her first lead role in over two, Koronel is retribution incarnate, a presence that refuses to be overlooked, even in mystery and silence.

– Dana Del Castillo