Meet Jorrybell Agoto, the nascent indie star behind Sundance-winning film ‘Filipiñana’

At an early age, Jorrybell Agoto was already a committed performer. Even if that means barely holding on to a dried twig and eventually tumbling down a small cliff while recreating a scene from the 1999 hit Mexican telenovela Rosalinda with kids her age, she’d go all in.

“Siyempre buong weight ko na ‘yong pinanghawak ko tapos naputol siya (Of course I was already using my entire weight to keep my grip then the twig snapped),” recalled Agoto, laughing. “Tapos dumausdos ako nang dumausdos (Then I kept sliding down the cliff).”

Now at 31, she has starred in several films that premiered at and toured the international film festival circuit to various acclaim, including a Best Actress plum at the 2024 Tokyo Film Festival for her performance in Sam Manacsa’s labor drama Cross My Heart And Hope To Die, first released in 2023 — Agoto’s breakout year.

At the time, Agoto had just secured her first two feature film credits at Cinemalaya: Kevin Mayuga’s When This Is All Over and Gian Arre’s Tether. Her supporting performance in the former later earned her a Gawad Urian nod. She also starred in a couple more shorts that year, such as Sonny Calvento’s TIFF-selected satire Primetime Mother and Mark Felix Ebreo’s Congratulations, DX!

But it is Agoto’s emotive visage in the closing scene of Rafael Manuel’s thesis short Filipiñana that introduced me to her promise past the confines of being an “indie darling.” The film premiered at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival, winning the Silver Bear.

The audition process for Filipiñana was unlike the auditions Agoto was used to, where actors line up in a room and are each asked to perform a scene or deliver a monologue. Instead, Agoto was given a one-hour, interactive audition mostly to build rapport with Manuel, then accompanied by producer Kiko Meily. “I couldn’t remember acting out a scene,” she said.

The final callback, though, was epic. Then working on an advocacy program in Laguna, Agoto ran so late that she had to walk the South Luzon Expressway and book a motorcycle ride to Makati. When she arrived, sweating and panting, she immediately asked for water. “Sobrang kapal ng mukha ko, ‘te (I was so shameless),” said Agoto. Later on, she got the part.

Agoto has reprised the role for Manuel’s first feature of the same name, which premiered in-competition at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, and played in the Perspective program of this year’s politically divisive Berlinale, which accepted Agoto into its talent development lab last year. Executive produced by contemporary auteur Jia Zhangke, the languid class satire has been acquired by Kino Lorber for theatrical and digital distribution in North America later this year.

In the story, Agoto plays a curious, underpaid tee girl named Isabel, who is gradually exposed to the sinister secrets beneath the perfectly manicured beauty of an elite Manila golf course. It is through her calculated calmness that the country club’s faux placidity, and, by extension, the film’s narrative, bears more weight. She never lost such hypnotic hold as she slips into similar working-class characters throughout her filmography, even in the visually stunning but ultimately schematic class commentary of When This Is All Over.

In ‘Filipiñana,’ a pristine golf club conceals something far more terrifying. Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute

Shot in 2024, Filipiñana had the actress fretting over the temporal gap between the short and full-length versions, given that she plays a teenager. “It was one of the struggles and challenges for me: to capture the naïveté and childlike behavior of the character,” she explained.

But with greater experience at her disposal, Agoto became more transparent about her acting choices with her director, who she said was hands-on but did not micro-manage her. Manuel and Agoto were so in tune with each other because he had kept her on board since the preproduction: interviewing tee girls, performing their job, and even playing the sport itself to better grasp the class divide the movie exposes and golf courses inherently display. “We even had test shoots using an iPhone,” she added.

When Agoto acts, she’s disarmingly stoic and subdued, allowing the minutiae to scream her character’s inner disquiet. Meet her in person and you’ll instantly notice she’s worlds apart from her onscreen persona — she is loud, messy, and animated in the sense that humor is her default, like a living meme. She’s never scared to speak her mind and speak at length.

Like Isabel, Agoto moved to Manila from Ilocos — where she grew up with a younger brother, a stay-at-home mother, and a government worker father — to study theater arts at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. Deemed “too ambitious” by her father for dreaming too big in the metropolis, she grinded her way to stability, enough to somehow subsist on acting.

Her time at PUP laid the foundation not just for her practice but, more crucially, her principles as an artist and person. “That’s where I realized the responsibility of being an artist,” said Agoto, detailing how community theater, like interfacing with and performing for survivors of Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), dismantled the Westernized theater she was taught to absorb. “It’s not just a form of self-expression; artists also have the power to be the voice for those kinds of stories.” 

The pivot from theater to film began when Agoto’s close friend and collaborator Christian Dagsil noticed she moved oddly on stage. Apart from this, singing is not her strongest suit, which kept her from securing roles in a local theater terrain that defaults to musicals. Instead, after college, she exclusively worked behind the scenes.

Sometime in 2015, she interned on Jet Leyco’s QCinema entry Matangtubig, a small-town crime story akin to Twin Peaks, Agoto’s self-confessed acting awakening. Because she slept mid-shoot, Leyco cast her as the body double for the murdered daughter of Thelma Cruz, portrayed by Mailes Kanapi.

In the scene, which is featured early in the film for 25 seconds, Thelma, on her knees, identifies her child’s body found lifeless in the bush, as onlookers gather behind her. The camera never lands on the actual corpse. On set, though, Agoto was covered by a plastic trash bag, while lying on the cold ground under blinding lights. There was a tiny gap where she could see Kanapi entering the scene, caressing the body, in complete shock, sans tears or any dialogue. Under the synthetic sheath, Agoto was in sheer awe of what she just witnessed, screaming and cursing inside her head.

“Ang galing niya. May naramdaman pa rin ako kahit hindi ‘yong ideal na iyak na nasa utak ko (She was amazing. I still felt something, though it wasn’t the ideal breakdown scene in my mind),” she said. “From there, lumakas ‘yong loob ko na gawin ko ‘tong pagpepelikulang ‘to (From there, I got the courage to pursue filmmaking).”

A year later, Agoto tried her luck at onscreen acting, though to no avail, including a botched audition for an unreleased Cinemalaya title. “I couldn’t strike the balance,” she said. “If in theater I was underacting, in film I was overacting.”

The official poster for ‘Filipiñana.’ Photo courtesy of Magnify Films

Left with no callbacks and switching between gigs, from managing events to selling condominiums, Agoto found her footing through photographer Belle Dinglasa, who offered her to act in music videos, starting with Nikki Nava’s “Secrets.” Stripped of a script and therefore overpreparation, it allowed her acting process to be “as human and as natural as possible,” and to discern that cinema, unlike theater, is not an actor’s medium.

That served as a blueprint for her acting style, later refined by a Meisner training under Angeli Bayani. In Filipiñana, this is palpable through the suppressed emotion and restrained physicality she’s tasked to sustain, as Isabel is never allowed an explosive release. “I still felt my stomach twisting while watching the movie [at Berlinale],” she said.

Agoto, however, dreads that she might be typecast for it. Fortunately, recent projects like Jun Robles Lana’s Sisa, out in local theaters this week, allowed for a more pronounced acting, assuaging her fear. “In a way, I am the comic relief in the film,” shared Agoto.

What can be said for certain is that the actress will never stop playing parts reflecting the plight of the working class. “I’ve learned to accept these roles because they are the manifestation of the current state of the Philippines,” said Agoto. “Not unless poverty ceases to exist, these kinds of stories will stop.” Poverty, she insists, is just a common denominator of the characters she has played and never a one-size-fits-all experience that neatly defines them.

Since her breakthrough three years ago, life hasn’t radically shifted for Agoto yet. Her projects didn’t totally spike up, but she’s no longer in survival mode. Booking roles, she said, is still a numbers game, as online following factors into casting decisions. But she doesn’t really lose faith. Who knows if her dream Lav Diaz collaboration is already waiting in the wings?

“Kailangan makapanganak pa ng mga filmmakers na matatapang at grabe ‘yong tiwala nila sa mga kuwento nila na hindi na nila inaasa sa mga kukunin nilang artista ‘yong pagiging bankable ng pelikula nila,” she said.

(We need more filmmakers who are bold and have immense faith in their stories that they no longer have to rely on the artists they’ll cast for their films to be bankable.)

Still from ‘Filipiñana.’ Photo courtesy of the Berlinale website

Agoto has always been a perceptive artist on and offscreen in much the same way as she remains firm in her belief that cinema and any form of art will always be political.

At this year’s Berlinale, main competition jury president Wim Wenders sparked criticism for saying that filmmakers should “stay out of politics” in response to questions about the complicity of the German state, the festival’s major financier, in the Israeli genocide in occupied Palestine.

Despite attending the festival for Filipiñana, Agoto said we can never escape politics. A brief scan of her body of work attests to that conviction. At the same time, she hopes that filmmakers maximize the opportunity to shift the perception of the audience about systemic injustice and violence. 

That becomes more pressing now in light of the colonialist Israeli-American bombing of Iran. At this point, it feels weird to be talking about moving pictures when mass killings are livestreamed at a pace that cruelly desensitizes the world to its horror.

Agoto knows full well that cinema can only do so much, but it doesn’t stop her from trying. “Gawin mong political (Make it political),” she said. “It’s the smallest thing na kaya mong ibigay sa mundo bilang artist (It’s the smallest thing you can offer the world as an artist).”

“Hindi man siya magkakaroon ng abrupt [effect] or cure sa shit ng mundo pero at least may mai-instill kang magandang bagay sa audience na makakapagpabago sa kung paano nila bubuuin ‘yong mundong darating.”

(It might not have an abrupt [effect] or cure for the shit of the world, but at least you can instill something good in the audience that might change the way they’ll shape the world ahead.) – Rappler.com

Note: Some quotes in Filipino have been translated into English for brevity.