Journalist Massacre Drama ‘Once Upon a Time in the Philippines’ Turns a Bystander Into an Accomplice at Busan Asian Project Market

A young woman pulled into the run-up to a political massacre slides from unwilling witness to accomplice in “Once Upon a Time in the Philippines,” the debut feature from E del Mundo inspired by the 2009 Maguindanao massacre.

The project is part of the Asian Project Market, which runs within the Busan International Film Festival’s Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM).

Set in an invented locale that nods to the country’s south, the film centers on Sam, a 19-year-old who works at a gas station and gets caught up in killings by the private army of a political clan. In the aftermath, she hunts for her boyfriend, now missing and possibly a participant in the slaughter, and finds that one institution after another is bound up in the same apparatus of violence.

In 2009, armed men stopped a convoy of civilians, relatives, lawyers and journalists heading to submit election filings in Maguindanao and killed 58 people, at least 32 of them journalists and media workers. The producers note that it is widely considered the deadliest single attack on journalists on record.

Del Mundo was raised under the weight of an event she says the Philippines has never truly come to terms with. “I came to believe that atrocities of this magnitude are rarely the work of a single monster. They are made possible by a multitude of people who obey, participate, remain silent, or simply stop asking questions,” she says. “That conviction transformed the film into something closer to a forensic examination of myself within my own society.”

She is drawn to the fragility of a woman’s mind inside a stifling life shaped by men, and the steady acceptance of the violence built into it. Del Mundo calls the film “a coming-of-age story swallowed whole by the political reality of the Philippines,” and uses Sam, though fictional, as her route into a collective trauma. “I hope audiences leave with the recognition that we belong to something larger than ourselves, and that something larger also lives within us, the good, the bad, and the ugly of it all,” she says.

The film is produced by Kyle Nieva and Gian Carlo Librojo of the Philippines’ Screen Asia with Pamela Reyes, in co-production with France’s Piano Sano Films and Norway’s DUOfilm. Co-producers are Idris Lettifi, Marie Fuglestein Lægreid, Linda Bolstad Strønen and Ingrid Lill Høgtun. Screen Asia also produced del Mundo’s VR film “Yellowfin,” which premiered at Cannes.

Nieva says the earlier collaboration gave the producers strong faith in del Mundo’s vision, and that she approaches political violence through one young woman’s experience rather than spectacle. For Librojo, a broadcast journalist, the project carries a personal weight. “The massacre cannot be treated only as a closed chapter in history. It reveals structures of political power, fear, and impunity that continue to shape Philippine society,” Librojo says.

The project has been through Cannes’ Cinéfondation L’Atelier and Producers Network, the Venice Gap-Financing Market, Locarno Open Doors, where it won a development award and a Sørfond award, TorinoFilmLab, where it took the FOCAL Resource Award, and the Singapore International Film Festival’s Southeast Asian Film Lab. It has backing from the CNC and Institut français’ Aide aux cinémas du monde, the Norwegian Film Institute’s Sørfond, Visions Sud Est and Purin Pictures.

Now in advanced financing after years of development, the team is using Busan to close the remaining gap and meet partners to take the film into production. “After such a long development journey, we hope Busan can be the final bridge between development and production,” Nieva says.