Antoinette Jadaone’s Berlinale winner becomes a site-specific play in mid-2027, taking over an entire Metro Manila building. It’s part of the first slate from her new company, Ilaya Ilaya, announced on September 26.
In the film, Sunshine makes the hardest decision of her life mostly alone. When the story moves to the stage in mid-2027, Jadaone wants the audience making it with her: on screen, she said when Sunshine: The Immersive Stage Adaptation was announced on September 26, you watch Sunshine decide; onstage, you decide alongside her.
Maris Racal returns to the title role in her stage debut. Xyriel Manabat, also debuting onstage, reprises Thea, Sunshine’s best friend, and Elijah Canlas returns as Miggy, the father of Sunshine’s unborn child. For Canlas, the news comes days after his turn as student activist Edgar Jopson drew some of the best reviews of his career; for Manabat, it follows her lead role in CinePanalo’s Stuck on You.
A Play That Takes Over a Building
There’s no conventional stage and no fixed seating. The production will occupy an existing Metro Manila building from end to end, using its rooms, corridors, and common areas, and the audience moves through it, choosing which characters to follow and finding scenes the film never showed. Two people could leave the same performance having seen different versions of the story. Production manager Joshua Chan, who ran the Philippine National Week at Expo 2025 Osaka, has described the job as turning the whole building into Sunshine’s world rather than staging a play inside it.
For Racal, the draw is simpler. Returning to a character she has called one of the best things that ever happened to her, she said, “I missed being her so much.”
The Film It Comes From
Jadaone’s Sunshine follows a teenage gymnast who discovers she is pregnant during the week of her national team tryouts, and tracks her path toward a seller of illegal abortion pills and the mysterious girl she meets along the way. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024, won the Crystal Bear in the Berlinale’s Generation 14plus section in 2025, and opened in Philippine cinemas in July 2025. Racal won Best Actress at the EDDYs for the role and was nominated at the 49th Gawad Urian.
The film is still collecting recognition. On September 24, it led all independent films at the Philippine Movie Press Club’s Star Awards with 12 nominations, including Movie Actress of the Year for Racal.
Who’s Making It
Mikko Angeles directs; he was nominated at the Gawad Buhay, the Philippine theater industry’s peer awards, for directing Bar Boys: A New Musical. Playwright and actor Mikaela Regis is adapting Jadaone’s screenplay, after an Outstanding Original Script nomination at the 14th Gawad Buhay for her one-act play Unica Hijas. Theater veteran Phi Palmos, who also appears in CinePanalo’s Multwoh, is producing. Palmos has called Sunshine a story that is both beloved and controversial, which makes it a riskier and more interesting one to put an audience inside.
Ilaya Ilaya’s First Slate
The stage adaptation is part of the first slate from Ilaya Ilaya, the production company Jadaone launched with longtime collaborator Reign Anne De Guzman. The two have worked together since their Star Cinema days, when Jadaone was a script continuity supervisor and De Guzman a production assistant; De Guzman went on to produce That Thing Called Tadhana and Sunshine. The company says it wants to back women-led stories, underrepresented genres, and filmmakers who struggle to find support from studios and festival funds.
The rest of the slate leans hard into genre. Boldstar, a dark comedy starring Angelica Panganiban, revives a project stalled by a string of delays, including Panganiban’s pregnancy and Jadaone’s own work on Sunshine. Eugene Domingo headlines Chandra Catacutan and the Curse of the Fuchsia Moon, a supernatural comedy in which she plays the eldest daughter of a manananggal, the folklore creature whose upper body detaches to fly at night. When her mother suffers a stroke mid-flight, she can’t rejoin her lower half. Kaila Estrada leads Birdsong, a found-footage horror film directed by Pam Miras; Irene Villamor directs Crème de la Crème, a coming-of-age whodunit; and an untitled romantic-comedy series is in development for Netflix Philippines. Of all of it, Sunshine is the only project with an opening window.
What We Don’t Know Yet
The building hasn’t been named, and there are no performance dates or ticket prices yet. The full cast hasn’t been announced either, including whether other actors from the film return. Immersive productions often cap how many people can attend each performance, and Ilaya Ilaya hasn’t said what capacity it’s planning for.