A boy rushing to line up for water in a drought-stricken Manila neighborhood is nearly hit by a van carrying foreign tourists to a suburban golf course with sprinklers on verdant greens.
So begins Rafael Manuel’s debut feature film, “Filipiñana,” which begins its U.S. theatrical release in New York on Friday. It follows a 17-year-old girl from a far-off province who finds work at a golf club near Manila, the Philippine capital, after her family is evicted from land they had once farmed.
“Filipiñana” is already one of the most highly anticipated Filipino films in recent years. It satirizes the exclusive enclaves of the wealthy, examining tensions between a country club’s guests and its staff in a similar vein as “The White Lotus,” an HBO drama whose latest season was set at a luxury resort in Thailand.
But the inequalities that Mr. Manuel stages on the golf course have particular resonance in the Philippines, where land ownership has long been concentrated among wealthy families. His movie is an examination of class, political power and postcolonial legacy in the country.
Some of the land that was part of former Spanish agricultural estates has been converted into industrial hubs, gated communities and golf courses, displacing tenant farmers who had tilled the land for generations. Land conflicts remain widespread in the Philippines, with hundreds of disputes over agricultural and ancestral lands still unresolved.
To evoke those inequalities, the film whisks the viewer from familiar scenes of poverty in Manila — a megacity congested with people, vehicles, malls and high-rises — into its spacious, exclusive suburbs.
“I wanted to find a way to talk about these very real issues of injustice and class disparity without having to fall back on visual tropes,” said Mr. Manuel, who is based in Amsterdam and expanded “Filipiñana” from his 2020 short film of the same name.
He found inspiration in the golf courses where his parents played when he was growing up in the Philippines. “A golf course is a very large and fertile plot of land, but ultimately it’s enjoyed and profited from by only a select few,” he said.
In the film, the teenage protagonist, Isabel, crosses the course to deliver a golf club to Dr. Palanca, the club’s president, who has shown her a brief kindness at the driving range, where girls in pastel uniforms monotonously place balls on tees to spare golfers the trouble of bending down.
Later, she overhears Dr. Palanca saying that his family plans to develop land in Isabel’s home province that it has “almost lost” to agrarian reform. She recalls that the trucks that drove her family from their home bore the Palanca name.
The golf course, she learns, has similar origins.
The subtext of the film is a 1988 land reform program, through which the government has given deeds to around three million farmers. Substantial areas of eligible agricultural land remain undistributed, according to the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, a government research agency.
Powerful families used loopholes to hold on to their land, said Jun Borras, a professor of agrarian studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam. “Even if the farmers received land, there were no policies to support them, so many of them ended up selling their land back to the wealthy families,” he added.
Arnisson Andre Ortega, a geography professor at Syracuse University who studies urban development in the Philippines, said that property development there under the banner of creating local jobs became an “escape route for social justice claims.”
“Plenty of land that could have been redistributed to farmers was converted by developers,” he said. “In reality, the local people can’t enter those private enclaves.”
Parts of the film were shot at Puerto Azul, a vast resort development south of Manila that opened in the late 1970s. It was owned by a family that was accused of profiting from their connection to the dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos. The family and Mr. Marcos’s descendants denied the allegations, and a lawsuit brought by the government against the family was dismissed by an anti-graft court in 2023 for insufficient evidence.
Mr. Manuel said that Puerto Azul’s clubhouse, with its exposed concrete and imposing geometric features rising above a golf course, was intentionally chosen for interior scenes.
“We really tried to pick clubhouses that had this sort of Brutalist design because we wanted to reference the ’60s and ’70s and show that not much has changed since these buildings were made,” he said.
At the Sundance Film Festival, where “Filipiñana” premiered in January, it won a special jury award for creative vision that highlighted the “insidious tension between luxury and labor.” Richard Brody, a film critic at The New Yorker magazine, later praised the movie for coaxing out “the cruelty of the resort’s hierarchies.”
In one scene, the camera lingers on tee girls napping on plastic stools and golf ball trays in a shed; later, Isabel catches their supervisor watching TV in an air-conditioned room. Characters move in and out of frames that often sit empty for long stretches, leaving the viewer to simmer in the heat and stillness.
Mr. Manuel said the film’s slow pace mirrors the lack of social change despite repeated upheavals, from the revolution against Spanish rule in the late 19th century to the 1986 uprising that ousted Mr. Marcos.
“The revolution in the Philippines is at a standstill,” he said. “The weather in itself is oppressive. It encourages you to stay still and stay in your place.”
