‘Filipiñana’ Trailer: Something Sinister Lurks Beneath a Philippine Country Club in Darkly Funny Sundance Winner

“Beneath the pristine surface of a country club in the Philippines, a sinister buried truth,” as I wrote out of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

One of the films to make the biggest splash out of the Sundance Film Festival‘s 2026 World Cinema Dramatic Competition, where it won the Special Jury Award for Creative Vision: first-time writer/director Rafael Manuel’s “Filipiñana.” With a surreal visual language that hat-tips everyone from Jacques Tati to Michael Haneke and the filmmaker’s longtime mentor Jia Zhangke, the film is a striking, startling class critique based on Manuel’s own Silver Bear-winning 2020 short film. Kino Lorber releases the film in theaters starting August 28. Watch the trailer below.

More from the official synopsis: “Isabel, a 17-year-old from the rural north of the Philippines, works at a posh country club outside Manila. Amid stifling heat and pervasive drought, she lines up golf balls for powerful men to drive into the carefully manicured verdant horizon. Between shifts, she wanders the immaculate grounds, sampling its luxuries and exploring its liminal spaces. The club’s members, including an industrialist and his expatriate niece, the president and his pampered wife, and a slew of Chinese tourists, engage in a complex dance with the doting and subservient staff. But something is rotting beneath the pristine fairways of the elite resort, as Isabel discovers when she tries to return a mislaid golf club to its patriarchal director, Dr. Palanca. The deeper she journeys into Alabang’s most exclusive corners, the closer she gets to the violent truths of the club, her native Philippines, and her own past.”

The cast includes Jorrybell Agoto, Carmen Castellanos, Teroy Guzman, Carlitos Siguion-Reyna, Isabel Sicat, and Nour Hooshmand.

IndieWire’s Chief Film Critic David Ehrlich wrote out of Sundance, “More than any other film that comes to mind, Rafael Manuel’s ‘Filipiñana‘ taps into something that I’ve always found inherently sinister about golf courses: Sprawling gardens of solipsism that invite players to compete against themselves (and offer masters of the universe an ideal environment to affirm their status as they broker deals with each other between holes), they’re so elegantly imposed upon the land that it’s easy to forget that something else was ever there in the first place.”

The film opens August 28 in New York and September 4 in Los Angeles, with more dates to follow.