‘SUNDAY BEAUTY QUEEN’ is the sincerest film in this year’s Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) lineup, if not the most heartwarming of them all.

Being a documentary works in the film’s favor, helping it eclipse other, stronger-on-paper films in the festival on so many levels. Since the characters are real, their message reaches the audience in its full rawness — pure, unadulterated, as is, where is — making it easier to believe, and harder not to feel in the chest.

It’s not the first time the plight of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) has become the subject of a Filipino film, but ‘Sunday Beauty Queen’ captures the soul of being one. Following the lives of a few domestic helpers in Hong Kong, all tied together by a shared desire to make their Sundays count — even if that means chasing a beauty queen title — the film brings its audience to where it all happens: on stage and behind the scenes, inside their employers’ homes, in the shelter for migrant workers, and deep in the core of their hearts. Over those two-plus hours, the audience sees the many-sided lives of OFWs, and hears their hearts beating not just for the families they work for, but for the loved ones waiting back home.

It isn’t Flor Contemplacion’s story, or Delia Maga’s, but the stories on screen are just as heart-wrenching in their own right.

The film’s power goes beyond drawing a tear or two in scene after scene — it leaves a mark of its own on the viewer’s heart. Its storytelling and editing are strong enough that you almost wish it were fiction, that the people weren’t real, that these weren’t true stories.

With the Philippines home to more pageant fans than perhaps any other country, and Filipino pageant lovers as passionate as they come, ‘Sunday Beauty Queen’ is a must-see. It offers a peek into one facet of the beauty pageants we love, with a key difference: this time, it’s not about profit, popularity, or a cause — it’s about how a pageant becomes an escape, if not a genuinely important part of some of our OFWs’ lives.

‘Sunday Beauty Queen‘ isn’t without humor, of course, but its humor tends to break your heart a little too. It isn’t without poetry either, though its poetic lines couldn’t have been written by anyone but the people living them. Case in point, this line from Mylyn, one of the OFWs featured in the film:

“Nakaupo lang ako, nagbibilang ng mga eroplano, iniisip, ‘ilan pa kayang eroplano ang dadaan bago ako makauwi?”

And that’s just one of many lines worth remembering.

The film is a reminder of how hard it is to work away from your own family, and how painful it can be to serve someone else’s family in order to provide for yours. It puts new meaning behind the truth that our OFWs are more than just ordinary heroes.

As packed with substance as ‘Sunday Beauty Queen‘ is, its technical craft matches it beat for beat. Director Babyruth Villarama clearly knows what she’s doing, and it shows — the sound design, the frames, the editing as a whole, every shot chosen with intention. All of it adds up to a film worthy of a ‘Best Picture’ honor, and one of this writer’s personal favorites.

Go watch it with the people you love. Bring the teens along, too, and let the film teach them values you might struggle to put into words yourself.