On September 16, Elijah Canlas will open in Philippine cinemas nationwide as Edgar “Edjop” Jopson — the student leader who organized against Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s martial law regime as president of the National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP), and who was killed by military forces in Davao in 1982. “Edjop,” distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures Philippines, has been five years in the making. A youth-led “Campus Conversations” tour bringing the filmmakers to students nationwide launched this week, ahead of the release. It’s the kind of role an actor takes once in a career, if they’re lucky. Canlas has now built an entire filmography out of roles like it — and then walked off set and showed up at the real thing.
The Pattern, If You Look at the Whole List
Canlas has said Edjop shaped him more than any part he’s played since his 2019 breakthrough, “Kalel, 15” — the monochrome drama about an HIV-positive teenager that won him Best Actor at the Gawad Urian, FAMAS, and the Asian Film Festival in Rome, all in the same stretch. But Edjop isn’t an outlier in his catalog; it’s the sharpest example of a pattern that’s been building for years. In 2024’s “GomBurZa” — the historical drama about the three Filipino priests executed by Spanish colonial authorities in 1872, a case still cited as the spark that radicalized a young José Rizal — Canlas played Paciano Mercado, Rizal’s own brother and a revolutionary in his own right. In “Rumaragasa” (“Raging”), the Cinemalaya-developed drama that gave him his second consecutive trip to the Berlinale’s Panorama section this past February, he plays a young man in 1990s Sibuyan who turns a personal trauma into a pursuit of justice against the people who buried it. Even “About Us But Not About Us” — which he brought back to the stage this past February and March at Circuit Makati’s Power Mac Center Spotlight Blackbox Theater, opposite Romnick Sarmenta, in a run that directly conflicted with his own Berlinale trip — is a story about power, silence, and who gets believed. Different centuries, different stakes, same question running underneath: what does a person actually owe the people being crushed around them?
Off-Screen, the Same Question Keeps Getting an Answer
That question isn’t staying on set. Canlas has attended multiple Trillion Peso Marches — the nationwide protests against alleged corruption in government flood-control projects — including the EDSA People Power Monument rally, and has said plainly that he doesn’t weigh the career risk before he decides to show up. “Ako, generally wala akong paki masyado sa career ko,” he said on the youth program “YSpeak,” meaning, roughly, that he doesn’t worry much about what it might cost him. He’s described himself as a “scholar ng bayan” — a nod to having studied on a scholarship, and the sense of debt to the public that comes with it — and has pushed young Filipinos specifically to register to vote, tying the Marcos-era history he was researching for Edjop directly to the present. In a set-visit interview during Edjop’s production, he connected the two without being asked to: “A lot of people are oppressed and we have to fight for them,” he said. “It’s not just the youth.”
None of this reads as a talking point he’s repeating for press. He’s been saying versions of the same thing since well before Edjop had a release date, on productions with nothing to gain from the association.
The Part That Isn’t About Politics at All
The other current holding his year together is quieter. On August 2, Canlas marked three years since the death of his younger brother JM with a public post that read less like a celebrity statement than something meant for one person. “3 years feels like it’s forever,” he wrote. “I miss you so f*cking much, JM.” The Canlas family turned that loss into KULIT — Kalinga Unawa at Lingap sa Isip at Taglay, a mental health organization named for the nickname Elijah had for his brother — and has kept the conversation about grief and mental health public rather than private in the years since. It’s worth naming alongside the activism and the filmography, not as a footnote: the same instinct that sends him to a protest he doesn’t have to attend is the one that turns a private anniversary into something other people going through the same thing might actually use.
Canlas turns 26 on August 16 — four days from now, and a month out from Edjop’s release. For an actor whose entire 2025–2026 has been building toward one film about a man who died for exactly the kind of conviction Canlas keeps performing and practicing in the same breath, the timing is less a coincidence than a preview of what the next chapter of his career is actually going to be about.
Field Notes
“Edjop”: Directed by Katski Flores, starring Elijah Canlas as Edgar Jopson alongside Jodi Sta. Maria, Cedrick Juan, Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo, and Kakie Pangilinan. Opens nationwide in Philippine cinemas September 16, 2026, distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures Philippines.
Also this year: “Rumaragasa” (“Raging”) premiered internationally at the Berlinale’s Panorama section, February 2026. “About Us But Not About Us” ran as a stage adaptation at Circuit Makati’s Power Mac Center Spotlight Blackbox Theater, February 14–March 8, 2026.
Birthday: Canlas turns 26 on August 16, 2026.