A coming-of-age entry at this year’s Puregold CinePanalo Film Festival turns a grade-schooler’s puppy love into a two-generation problem.

Apolinario “Apol” Medina Jr. is in grade school, and he has a crush on his music teacher. That part is ordinary enough — most kids get over a teacher crush by high school. What complicates it is that Apol’s widowed father is falling for the same woman, and neither one found out from the other.

That’s the setup behind “Apol of My Ai,” one of seven feature films competing in this year’s Puregold CinePanalo Film Festival — the supermarket chain’s annual production-grant program, now in its third and biggest edition, which hands each of its seven finalists ₱5 million to make an original Filipino film. ElysPlanet already walked through how that grant model works and what it’s bought the festival so far in “Puregold CinePanalo 2026 Is Finally Showing What Its ₱5 Million Gamble Bought.” This entry is one of the seven it funded.

Directed by Thop Nazareno, the film stars Zanjoe Marudo as Tatay Poli, Apol’s single father, and Rochelle Pangilinan as Ma’am Ai, the choir teacher both of them have fallen for without telling each other. The title’s pun — “Apol of My Ai,” playing on the boy’s nickname and the teacher’s — is doing double duty for the son’s crush and the father’s, which is also the whole joke and the whole problem in one phrase.

A Two-Generation Crush, Played Straight

The premise could easily tip into farce, and there’s clearly comic material in a father and son unknowingly competing for the same woman’s attention. But the film’s own marketing frames it as a coming-of-age story first — Apol’s growing understanding of love, jealousy, and what it means to share feelings with a parent, set against the quieter reality of a single-dad household trying to move on. The love triangle is the hook; the actual subject is a kid realizing his father has a heart of his own, separate from his role as a parent.

It’s a variation on a premise Philippine cinema returns to often — the single-parent household as its own small universe, where a child’s growing pains and a parent’s stalled-out love life end up sharing the same small house. What “Apol of My Ai” adds to that formula is specificity: the crush is concrete and shared, the same actual woman pulling at both of them, which means every scene the three of them share is doing at least two things at once — advancing a kid’s story and a parent’s story that happen to be about the same person.

The Kid Who’s Done This Before

Zion Cruz, who plays Apol, is a newcomer to headlining a film, but not to a set. He’s worked with Nazareno once already, in “Ang Himala ni Niño,” and has a film credit in “The Kingdom” behind him too. On the awards side, he’s already won Child Performer of the Year at the PMPC Star Awards for Television — the Philippine Movie Press Club’s annual honors for the medium — and Child Star of the Year at the Platinum Stallion National Media Awards. “Apol of My Ai” is his first major lead role, built on a résumé that already includes two national acting wins.

Cruz has a second credit at this year’s CinePanalo, too: he also appears in “Wantawsan,” the festival’s Wednesday, opening-day entry — a rare double-booking for one young actor across the same festival year. Nazareno, for his part, has built a reputation on exactly this kind of grounded, character-driven family story rather than genre spectacle, which is part of why the reunion with Cruz reads less like stunt casting and more like a director going back to an actor he already knows can carry a scene without overplaying it.

What’s Actually at Stake for Apol

Underneath the love-triangle premise, the film is working through something a lot of only-children-of-single-parents will recognize: the specific vertigo of realizing your parent has a life, and a heart, independent of being your parent. Apol’s crush gives the story its lightness; his father’s parallel crush is what gives it its actual stakes, since Tatay Poli’s happiness and Apol’s own sense of not being replaced are both quietly on the line at the same time.

Whether the film resolves that tension through comedy, heartbreak, or something closer to both is exactly the kind of thing a ₱5-million grant is supposed to buy CinePanalo the room to attempt — a small, specific, two-hander of a premise that a bigger studio slate might have flattened into a straightforward rom-com. For a fest built to give Filipino filmmakers a shot at genuinely original stories, a father and son who don’t know they’re chasing the same woman is a decent test case.

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Puregold CinePanalo 2026 runs September 23 through October 4 at eight Metro Manila venues: Gateway Cineplex 18 Araneta (the festival hub, with exclusive Panorama Shorts screenings), TriNoma, Fairview Terraces, and Ayala Malls Feliz, Circuit, and Manila Bay, plus Market! Market! Tickets are ₱250 regular and ₱200 for PWDs, senior citizens, students, national athletes, and Aling Puring & Perks cardholders. A ₱2,000 festival pass covers all seven features plus the student shorts program — and anyone weighing that pass should know sales open a day early, September 22, at Gateway Cineplex 18 specifically, ahead of the general September 23 on-sale at the other seven venues.