Bulakna

A silhouette wearing a head torch stands on a small boat. The light wavers across the water, searching. A banca boat: a fisherman casts his net into the dark, hauling it back again and again. Night loosens into dawn, dawn into day. A boy sits beside the man, watching. We are on Naujan Lake, on the island of Mindoro in the Philippines. The film opens to the sounds of a busy morning in the village of Pasi II: roosters and hens, birds, people already at work, the clinking of dishes. Badodoy, the boy from the boat, sleeps in a hammock. His aunt, Melissa, checks on him and tells her mother, “Ma, Badodoy is asleep outside. He was out on the lake at night.” Her mother replies, “He misses his mother. It’s good for him when he has things to do.”

This opening establishes both location and situation. The location is a rural Philippine island, with its lush vegetation, open water, and the rhythm of everyday life. The situation is absence: Badodoy’s mother is abroad, working as a domestic employee. These elements sit in tension, where the beauty and viability of rural life coexist with the economic pressures that compel people – particularly women – to leave it.

Bulakna tells the story of Filipino women working as care labourers abroad. While the film initially presents itself as a documentary, it gradually evolves into a hybrid form, blending fact and fiction. Its narrative weaves together three threads: Norma, a woman working abroad who returns home; the fictionalised story of Melissa, a young woman preparing to leave the Philippines for the first time; and theatrical re-enactments of history and culture performed by a local Philippine theatre troupe, told from an indigenous perspective rather than that of the coloniser. Melissa is a fish vendor, and hers is the story that anchors the film’s central question: what is it that women leave behind? And what does life in the rural Philippines look like, without romanticising it? The landscape is stunning, but the rain is constant and the work is hard.

This back-and-forth, the weighing of going against staying, is discussed by Melissa and her two friends, one of whom is a trans woman and has just returned from abroad. Melissa, to justify her departure, says: “I feel limited here on the island. Like there should be more.” The response is incredulous: “What? Can you repeat that? You feel limited, that at night you can go out strolling?” The discussion turns to time: how many years abroad—one, two, five, ten? And to the possibility, or impossibility, of earning a living without leaving the country at all.

Through Norma, we glimpse the future awaiting many women abroad: loneliness, a life structured around others’ needs, and the uncertainty of what an employer might do. Norma does this work for the money, and also because she hopes to request family reunification in Lisbon. When she returns to visit, however, she is confronted with the fact that her children are grown, married, and may not want to move. It dawns on her that she will eventually come back to the Philippines. This moment is very powerful because, contrary to common stereotypes about migration, the film impresses upon viewers the strong desire to stay.

The Philippines was colonised by Spain (1521–1898), the United States (1898–1946), and Japan (1942–1945). Spanish and American rule reshaped language and education, repeatedly forcing the population to adapt to new systems that disrupted continuity. Indigenous languages were displaced in schools, public signage, and civic life, breaking the intergenerational transmission of culture. These layered histories surface in the film’s language and imagery: Spanish terms linked to labour signal colonial influence, while recurring images of absent mothers point to ongoing social and familial rupture. As the film states, “Our history was written by foreigners.”

The film also reflects on authorship and perspective. Leonor Noivo, aware of her position as a Portuguese woman, documents these stories without claiming to speak for her subjects. By relinquishing certain decisions to the people she films, Bulakna at times lacks framing and narrative coherence. But this is a consequence of something that is both ethical and necessary: it allows women to speak for themselves and prioritises lived experience over authorial control. For a complementary perspective shaped from within the community it portrays, Lingua Franca - a fictional film by Filipina trans director Isabel Sandoval - offers a subtle and resonant counterpart.

Bulakna emerges from patterns Noivo observed over decades. In 1980s Macao, she encountered young Filipino women migrating alone and living in isolation; years later in Portugal, she saw similar conditions reproduced, with women arriving under legal contracts yet having very little autonomy. Bulakna traces these continuities of female labour, precarity, and bodily restriction across time, linking colonial pasts to migrant presents. It becomes a film about women and femme-identifying people, about reclaiming history, and about the enduring effects of colonial rule. It is also a film about unlearning—about dismantling inherited assumptions to see migration and history more clearly. Its most significant gesture may be its refusal to centre Europe, reminding us that migration is not only a story of departure, but also of return.