Janina Mendoza

Caught in a creative struggle, a painter confronts her traumatic past and unfulfilled dreams when commissioned to paint seascape art, leading her on a journey of self-discovery through the depths of the sea and uncharted waters of her own.

In a mental rehabilitation center, a woman, newly turned sixty, with schizoaffective disorder, waits all year for her family to visit on her birthday. But as the day arrives, a typhoon threatens to derail her plans and her sense of reality.

When the local government threatens to evict her from her own land, a farmer renounces her Filipino citizenship and builds her own micronation.

The Philippines, 1902. The land is raw, wounded, occupied. Smoke clings to the trees. Blood soaks the soil. The war is over – but the violence lingers. Widows fill the villages. Mothers vanish into silence. Among them walks Sisa (Hilda Koronel), barefoot and broken, dismissed as mad by those who fear what they don't understand. But madness is only the surface.