History is a many-headed monster in Dustin Celestino’s Cinemalaya 2025 film ‘Hydra’
It was after the loss of Leni Robredo in the 2022 national elections that Dustin Celestino thought of Habang Nilalamon ng Hydra ang Kasaysayan, his latest feature now set to premiere at the 2025 Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, running from Oct. 3 to 12 at Shangri-La Plaza Cinemas.
A year later, following rounds of interviews with volunteers who worked on the campaign, he wrote an initial draft. The result, which follows Celestino’s Cinemalaya 2023 Special Jury Prize winner Ang Duyan ng Magiting, is a story about four people—a political strategist, a history professor, a disillusioned speechwriter, and an election lawyer—wrestling with a mournful political defeat.
“I wanted to write about the moment, not as a historical record, but as an emotional journey that portrayed my own insights,” he told PhilSTAR L!fe. “From the emotional and psychological fatigue, to the loss of hope, to finding ways to navigate the post-truth Philippines, to redefining what it means to participate in a meaningful struggle.”
Hydra, which Celestino described as an “existential drama,” calls into question our relationship with history and the many ways we make sense of its textures. “History is a hydra, a monolith with a million faces,” the director said.
“It became a metaphor for disinformation (a monster with many heads that tell different lies), for persistent corruption (cut off one head, two will emerge), and for our private, personal, and varied relationship with history.”
The making of Hydra
The movie was shot in six days with the core cast, which includes Dolly de Leon and Jojit Lorenzo (who also appeared in Duyan), alongside Zanjoe Marudo and Mylene Dizon. Post-production work got going around the second week of April through early September.
As with many local movies, Hydra’s biggest hurdle has to do with funding. Fortunately, Celestino had more help this time around, securing four financiers for the project, including Nathan Studios, which came in after the filming process.
When asked about the experience of working with his actors, Celestino said it’s nothing short of amazing. “Dolly de Leon is a world-famous actress for a reason,” he mused. “I’ve never met anyone who comes to work more prepared. You don’t ‘direct’ Dolly de Leon, you unleash her. When I work with her, I just inform her who I need her character to be, and she meticulously crafts the character from the inside out, creating a personality, a psyche, so that every gesture, facial expression, and vocal intonation comes from an emotional truth.”
Jojit Lorenzo, meanwhile, “might be the best actor no one knows about,” said the director. “I often tease him that he rarely gets considered for awards because he never looks like he’s acting. But he’s such an instinctive actor. He becomes a different person and, unless one knows him personally, I think his acting is ‘invisible.’ I have never seen an actor be able to ‘turn off’ his personal tics and mannerisms, and morph into a carefully curated character.”
As for Zanjoe Marudo, Celestino admitted that he’s surprised by the former’s acting mettle, especially the way he conveys emotion through movement and posture. “He has so much control over his body,” he observed.
“It’s probably from his years as a model, and being in front of the camera for decades, but he just knows how to move,” he continued. “In our discussions of the acting style I wanted him to do, we talked about Robert Bresson and how he called his actors ‘models.’ That’s how I wanted Z’s David to be, someone whose thoughts and emotions are revealed not through the words he says, but through posture, movement, and gesture.”
Then there’s Mylene Dizon. “She works with such intensity, focus, and unpredictability,” Celestino said. “When working with all our actors, I give them a lot of freedom to interpret the situation organically, to react, to respond to the energy of their scene partners. The characters played by Jojit, Dolly, and Zanjoe are powder kegs of emotional tension, disillusion, and pent-up rage. Mylene is the match, the unpredictable provocateur that has us wondering whether she’ll decide to set everything on fire.”
Treatment and visual lexicon
In terms of treatment, Hydra draws parallels to Duyan in that both films are segmented into chapters and lean heavily on dialogue, largely owing to Celestino’s background as a playwright, though his intentions for both visions are discreet.
On the one hand, Duyan as an ideological drama follows “a daisy chain narrative,” the filmmaker explained. “[It’s] a story structure where each segment is linked to the next through characters that are connected through a cause-and-effect chain. The narrative form is part of the content, and in Duyan, it is implied that one act of aggression and hostility—a simple classroom rant—can start a chain reaction of escalating violence.”
Hydra, on the other hand, wields an experimental symphonic arc structure in which “character arcs are introduced sequentially but culminate in mirrored order.” “To simplify, if we were to draw the character arcs, it would look like a rainbow. For example, Kiko’s story opens in Chapter 1 and ends in Chapter 8; Bea’s story opens in Chapter 2 and ends in Chapter 7.”
The movie also finds Celestino in yet another collaboration with cinematographer Kara Moreno, working alongside production designers Benjamin Padero and Carlo Tabije, sound designer Nicole Rosacay and scorer Paulo Protacio, editor John Rogers, and visual effects artists Hanns Scheewe and Jericho Layson.
Hydra is already the director’s third team-up with Moreno, and he described their artistic approach as “bottom-to-top filmmaking.” “It’s the opposite of top-to-bottom filmmaking where the logistics and practical elements are determined by the creative vision (the top). Kara and I determine the practical (aka ‘financial’) limits of the project before we come up with the aesthetic.”
“In Duyan, once we learned that we’d be shooting with barely any financing, Kara and I discussed the possibility of ‘talking paintings/photographs’ inspired by Roy Andersson films and Richard Tuschman’s photographic project, Hopper Meditations,” Celestino told L!fe.
Hydra leans on a visual lexicon aimed at reflecting “themes of history, memory, and time,” an aesthetic that “portrays reality as fragmented and subjective.”
“We created three different looks that represent the mundane, the mythical, and the surreal,” he said. “One practical implementation of that strategy is to juxtapose the mundane with surreal sound design to reveal a character’s subjective experience.”
“Another device we used was to insert tableaus of characters frozen in time or moving in slow motion to imply their existential apprehension. It’s an attempt to portray their desire to be stuck in time, to be in a perpetual state of stasis, in order to delay or avoid inevitable outcomes,” he added.
Hope: A radical choice
Apart from a reflection on history, Hydra is an assertion of hope.
“Hope, to me, is never passive,” mused Celestino. “It’s a radical choice that is made every day. The idea that ‘activity’ should be physical is not something I entirely agree with, as a philosophy graduate.”
Citing the Hegelian dialectic, Celestino said as a filmmaker, he flirts with clashing ideas “not to determine a ‘winning ideology’ but to allow the audience to dwell in philosophical contradictions, because those states compel our understanding to expand in order to accommodate ideological extremes.”
The director continued, “What’s portrayed in the film is not a prescriptive recommendation as to what should be done to move forward collectively, but to acknowledge the immeasurable existential value of choosing virtue, choosing good, choosing hope. Regardless of the historical outcome, whether or not our ‘side’ wins.”
There’s also a personal layer to this notion of hope, as Celestino’s wife, producer Janel Gutierrez Celestino, battled cancer while making the film. “It’s hope, too, that allows her to push past her own fear and despair, to make a film about how everything good that we do, regardless of victory or defeat, is never ever wasted. The good, even in defeat, even unfulfilled, holds immeasurable beauty and value.”
“Like the characters in Hydra, there have been many moments throughout our medical journey that I, too, wanted to be stuck in time with her, to preserve and spare the present that we have from the uncertain future,” Celestino shared. “It’s hope that allows me to find peace and solace in the belief that there is an infinity in the moments that we share that extend beyond the limits of history.”
Habang Nilalamon ng Hydra Ang Kasaysayan is among the official entries to this year's Cinemalaya. Watch the trailer below.