Edjop film review: Remembering Martial Law through the eyes of those who lived it

There is a moment in the new film Edjop where the past stops being a memory and starts being a presence. It arrives unannounced, like a knock on the door you hoped would never come. That is exactly what director Katski Flores intended.

“Our goal is to show the cost,” Flores says of the film, which tells the story of Edgar Jopson, the student activist known to history as Edjop, a key figure during the First Quarter Storm of 1970 and the years of Martial Law that followed. “And to show the cost through the survivors' stories.”

The film opens with epitaphs and the words: “Inspired by memories of real events.” That phrasing matters. This is not a biopic in the traditional sense. It is not a documentary retelling of a life. It is something more personal, a retelling filtered through the people who knew him.

What is the film Edjop about?

The story unfolds through the eyes of Edjop's granddaughter, Joyette Jopson, a triathlete who has spent her life running from her family's political legacy. She skips memorials. She avoids political events. She focuses on her sport, on the discipline of the body, on anything that keeps the past at a distance.

But the past does not stay away. Her memories, and the memories her mother passed down to her, pull us into flashbacks of the Marcos era, the student protests, and the declaration of Martial Law. The narrative does not move in a straight line. It weaves, like memory itself, building a tapestry of what it meant to fight for freedom and what that fight cost.

What the film captures is not historical precision, though the major events are grounded in fact and eyewitness accounts. It captures emotional truth. The truth of how people remember.

How did the filmmakers research Edjop's story?

Flores and her co-writer Jade Castro built the screenplay from interviews and the book UG: An Underground Tale by Benjamin Pimentel, which covers Edjop's life from childhood to his death.

“This is how people remembered him,” Flores says of the film's structure. “But supported by facts.”

The biggest source was Edjop's wife, Joy Jopson. Flores spent six weeks, every weekend, interviewing her while she was “at the tail end of her lucidity.” In the film, Joy Jopson suffers from dementia. Flores witnessed that decline firsthand, which is why she cautions that some memories may be affected by time and illness.

The team also had a dedicated researcher and spoke with Edjop's siblings and friends. That created a challenge for the writers. “If you base it on their memories or in the book, he doesn't have any flaws,” Flores says. “He's a saint.”

The task became finding the man behind the legend. The father. The brother. The husband. The student. “Without losing who he is to so many people,” Flores adds.

Why does the film use two timelines?

The film runs on two tracks: Edjop's story in the past and his daughter's story in the present. Flores says her directorial thrust was simple: “The past is coming for us.”

She realized during the second or third draft of the screenplay that the film was about “us reckoning with the past.” She wanted to make the past aggressive, inescapable. “Because I feel, politically, that is what is happening to our country.”

The filmmaking reflects that tension. Flashback scenes are shot with a handheld camera, capturing the raw energy of student activism. Present-day scenes are steady, shot on a tripod. Director of photography Neil Daza frames Jodi Sta. Maria, who plays Joyette, in wide shots that make her look small in a vast space. Elijah Canlas, who plays Edjop, is shot close up, in your face.

Flores wanted Joyette to feel “like leaves floating in a big, big world.” That framing represents Filipinos today, she says, carrying the weight of history in an emptiness that surrounds us.

Editor Benjamin Tolentino keeps the two timelines moving with remarkable pace. The film runs two hours but never drags. I checked my watch at what felt like the end, only to find 40 minutes had passed.

Is Edjop accessible to general audiences?

There are moments where the dialogue hits a little too hard, a little too on the nose. Characters deliver patriotic missives about fighting tyranny that feel scripted. But that is part of the film's intention.

“The only reaction, really, that I'm wary of is the one that shuts down or doesn't get involved emotionally or intellectually,” Flores says. “This film will not serve its purpose if it is not accessible.”

And it is accessible. It has a love story. It has a daughter trying to reconcile with a father she never fully knew. It has the tension of a political thriller and the weight of a history lesson. It delivers all of it in a film that feels epic without losing its intimacy.

What does Edjop teach us about Martial Law history?

Between this film and the play Subversive Lives, which I saw last week, I am struck by how little our educational system covers the Martial Law era. In the 1990s, that period was a short section in one chapter of our textbooks, discussed in a single session on a single day.

I knew the stories. My father told me about those times. I was seven during the EDSA Revolution and remember it vaguely. But I did not grasp the full horror until I saw it portrayed by artists who took the time to listen to the people who lived through it.

Our history books were written by the winners. If you want to know what really happened, you have to go to the artists. The writers of fiction and non-fiction. The filmmakers. They show us how people really lived.

Edjop does exactly that. It shows us the cost of freedom through the eyes of those who paid it. And it reminds us that the past is not done with us yet.

“Our goal is to show the cost, and to show the cost through the survivors' stories.”