John Arcilla’s most memorable co-star this year isn’t doing any press — mostly because it’s a carabao. In “Beast,” one of the seven feature entries at Puregold CinePanalo 2026, it also sings.
It’s Arcilla’s first Filipino independent film since he won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the 2021 Venice Film Festival — the festival’s top acting prize, and one of the most prestigious in world cinema — for “On the Job: The Missing 8,” making him the first Filipino actor to win it. “Beast” is a much smaller, stranger stage by comparison: an aging farmer finishing one last harvest for his landlord before a solo trip to Manila that stops being ordinary somewhere along the way.
A Farmer, a Journey, and Something That Shouldn’t Talk
That’s the setup on paper. What breaks the pattern is what happens on the road: reality loosens, and the farmer picks up an unlikely traveling companion — a carabao that sings.
Director Lawrence Fajardo is working in magic realism here — the storytelling mode that treats a fantastical element as an unremarkable part of everyday life rather than spectacle — and by most accounts, he’s using it to ground the story in something rawer than whimsy. The singing carabao is played straight, folded into the texture of a very specific, very Filipino kind of exhaustion and grief, rather than as a punchline. Almost all of that weight falls on Arcilla, who has to make a talking farm animal feel like an emotional extension of his character, not a gimmick.
It’s a deliberate swing for an actor at his level to take. Arcilla is also credited as a co-producer on “Beast,” which suggests a role he helped will into existence rather than one slotted between bigger projects. Candy Pangilinan and Karl Medina round out the cast.
Why It Matters for This Year’s CinePanalo
Puregold CinePanalo built its ₱5-million-grant model on the bet that Filipino filmmakers can be trusted with genuinely uncommercial swings, and “Beast” is arguably the clearest test of that bet in this year’s lineup — a magic-realist character study, not a broad comedy or a starry romance, that lives or dies on one actor’s ability to sell the unsellable.
If it lands, “Beast” gives this year’s festival something it hasn’t quite had yet: proof that the grant model can produce a film built around a genuinely strange, singular idea — with a Volpi Cup winner willing to put his name behind it.
An Off-Screen Cause
Off-screen, Arcilla has spent much of September pushing for something far less magical: the CADENA Act, Senate Bill No. 1506, formally the Citizen Access and Disclosure of Expenditures for National Accountability Act. The measure — passed unanimously by the Senate in December 2025 — would set up a blockchain-based Digital Budget Portal that makes government spending traceable and resistant to after-the-fact tampering. Arcilla renewed his public push for its passage this September, as flooding across the country reignited anger over misused disaster and infrastructure funds. “Ang panukalang ito ay hindi si Senator Bam Aquino ang makikinabang kundi ang Mamamayang Pilipino,” he said of the bill’s author, Senator Bam Aquino — the measure, he argued, benefits the Filipino public, not the senator himself. It’s consistent with the role he’s playing on screen this year too: an ordinary man just trying to get a fair shake.
Catch It
“Beast” screens as part of Puregold CinePanalo 2026, running September 23 to October 4 across eight Metro Manila venues — Gateway Cineplex 18 in Araneta City (the festival hub), Trinoma, Fairview Terraces, Ayala Malls Feliz, Ayala Malls Circuit, Ayala Malls Manila Bay, and Market! Market! Regular tickets are ₱250, with a discounted ₱200 rate for PWDs, senior citizens, students, national athletes, and Aling Puring and Perks cardholders. A ₱2,000 festival pass covers all seven features plus the student shorts program — passes go on sale September 22 at Gateway Cineplex 18, a day ahead of general on-sale at the other venues.