“I would rather have a country run like hell by Filipinos than a country run like heaven by the Americans, because however bad a Filipino government might be, we can always change it.” — Manuel L. Quezon
Some quotes behave like mirrors; this one behaves like a dare. I grew up hearing it weaponised at family gatherings, tossed across formica tables alongside talk of exchange rates and airline promos. In years when politics felt like a daily humiliation, cousins lined up at the U.S. Embassy at dawn, and my mother sighed about a congressman—Bartolome Cabangbang—who once campaigned for the Philippines to become America’s 51st state. The fantasy had an elevator pitch: if heaven couldn’t be achieved, at least borrow its postal service. But we didn’t become a state. We became ourselves: a republic wobbling between reform and relapse, making and unmaking its own myths.
Jerrold Tarog’s Quezon meets that dare head-on, not as civics homework but as a sleek political thriller. Rounding out TBA Studios’ “Bayaniverse,” the film tracks the transformation of Manuel L. Quezon (Jericho Rosales) from wily provincial operator to the Commonwealth’s first president, a politician whose charm is as calculated as his convictions. Tarog plants us in the churn of American-occupied Manila: Quezon spars with Governor-General Leonard Wood (Iain Glen), calibrates a combustible rivalry-cum-partnership with Sergio Osmeña (Romnick Sarmenta), and grooms the ambitious Manuel Roxas (JC Santos) as both protégé and pawn. On the home front, he steadies himself in Aurora Quezon (Karylle). As a newsroom thread—via the fictional journalist Joven Hernando (Arron Villaflor/Cris Villanueva)—unspools the manufacture of image, the rise turns into a study of how headlines and newsreels are minted as weapons as much as records. The film funnels these frictions toward the 1935 election face-off, where Quezon collides with an implacable rival, General Emilio “Miong” Aguinaldo (Mon Confiado), and patronage, press, and personality become the actual battlegrounds.
The dare, the variations, the target
About that quote. You’ll find it circulating in more than one costume—sometimes “country,” “government,” sometimes “Americans,” sometimes “any foreigner.” One version includes the crucial second clause (“because however bad…”), another drops it. The elasticity isn’t trivial; it changes the target and the moral. “Americans” makes the provocation specific; “any foreigner” turns it into a general principle of sovereignty. Either way, the coda matters: Quezon wasn’t romanticising hell; he was betting on the ballot. In a later speech, he circled back to the phrase to argue that the Commonwealth he led was not, in fact, “run like hell”—a politician countering a meme before memes were memes. The paradox is the point: independence is both an aspiration and a responsibility, and the bill comes due.
That bill is the spine of Quezon. The movie understands that Philippine politics didn’t suddenly learn patronage from the Americans; it inherited a feudal choreography from Spanish times, with landholding families and their wards simply changing the language of the favours. The film renders this with a cool eye: envelopes glide; appointments appear; obligations accrue like compound interest. The scene where Wood lectures on the self-seeking Filipino elite feels uncomfortably contemporary—not because a foreigner is scolding us, but because the diagnosis reads like a doctor reciting our chart.
A republic of favours (and receipts)
Tarog stages nation-building as back-room procedural—call it The West Wing with cigars and bolos. Pong Ignacio’s cinematography likes brass and shadow; the production design evokes pre-war Manila without embalming it. Tarog, doubling as editor and composer, cuts between smoke-thick caucuses and street-level canvassing, splicing faux newsreels into the action to show how the campaign’s moving pictures shape the movement itself. The musical choices are brash by design: a lush, modern score that occasionally tips into in-your-face—like Filipino desserts, decadent and sweet, sometimes too much, but undeniably alive. When the tempo syncs to the drama—particularly in the film’s back half—the aesthetic coheres: an origin story cut to the beat of ambition.
Details count, and the film knows it. We hear nicknames—“Casey” for Quezon, an Americanised gloss; “Miong” for Aguinaldo—that ground the dialogue in period texture. A small fundraising scene lands like a thesis: Quezon nudges a wealthy friend’s check from ₱2,000 toward a blank, cloaking pressure in godfatherly warmth. Elsewhere, he purchases a printing press—Joven’s Alerta—and with it buys narrative; later, he cites Murnau and Errol Flynn to mint a filmic self. What we now call “content strategy” once wore tails.
The newsroom strand isn’t just connective tissue from the earlier films—it’s the movie’s conscience. Joven begins as a witness, becomes an accomplice, and ends up a judge. Tarog is clear-eyed about the cost: sovereignty demanded its spin doctors as well as its saints. As the 1935 campaign heats up, the machinery locks onto a historic grudge match. Quezon’s camp leans into ruthless realpolitik—newsreels that canonise the candidate, exposés that revive the darkest accusations around Andrés Bonifacio and Antonio Luna, pension and land-grant pressure that boxes Aguinaldo in—until the race becomes less a referendum than a seminar in modern image warfare. The birth of a republic arrives with the aftertaste of a smear.
Performances, up close
Rosales is the movie’s gamble and its dividend. He doesn’t imitate; he modulates. The iconic facial detail is there, but it’s the sound that persuades—the toggling between Tagalog and English, the Senate-floor bite, the public grin that never quite reaches the eyes. Watch the national debate scene, when an ex-wife appears; Rosales lets anger rise and then sit, weaponising restraint. The dance with Karylle’s Aurora is a necessary breather, but also a code for their marriage: a ceremony masking calculus.
Confiado’s Aguinaldo is his most lived-in take yet: principled to a fault, a ghost who won’t stop haunting the republic. Glen plays Leonard Wood with patrician chill and a reformer’s zeal, the imperial bureaucrat who believes he’s the adult in the room. Sarmenta’s Osmeña and Santos’s Roxas sketch a credible axis of rivalry and succession. The political encounters are where the accents (Rosales’s Quezon, Sarmenta’s Visayan lilt) stop being mimicry and become music. The foreign ensemble matters—and for once feels cast, not merely imported. Nico Locco’s Sergeant Johnston and the American retinue hold their own, ending a sorry local tradition of ornamental white faces adrift as poorly acted extras amidst the leading Filipino celebrity actors.
Not everything is burnished. The prosthetics/makeup and period styling are decent at times, though some makeup looks cakey depending on the lighting angle, and the early reels can feel stately when they should simmer. But when the film finds its groove—roughly from the campaign’s midpoint—the rhythm sharpens, culminating in a National Assembly debate sequence that lands like a civics pageant crossed with a knife fight.
Power in Philippine politics
What is this movie saying about power, and who gets hurt? Quezon answers with uncomfortable clarity. The film shows Quezon as both hero and anti-hero, the patron saint of realpolitik and its first penitent. He personifies a promise that still structures Filipino life: we can change a bad government. And yes, we have, repeatedly—six-year cycles punctuated by longer exceptions (Ferdinand Marcos Sr. for about twenty years, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for nine, Quezon himself for roughly nine). But the film’s darker inference is that we’ve become experts at changing faces without changing incentives. The pork, the PDAF, the flood-control scandals, the kickbacks dressed up as “services”—the choreography persists. We mint Overseas Filipino Workers as heroes because their remittances paper over the same structural deficits our elections refuse to fix.
Tarog’s storytelling is a thesis about manufacturing consent: documents move across desks, headlines arrive already italicised, footage loops back to rewrite what we think we saw. The recreated silent propaganda—streaked, jittery, seductively authoritarian—doesn’t just annotate the drama; it indicts it. The sound mix favours speeches as percussion, the score pushes urgency when the dialogue risks didacticism, and the choreography of extras (particularly in Quezon’s rallies and Aguinaldo’s sorties, where supporters dressed in black weaponise rumour) becomes a reading of crowd psychology. The craft is arguing as loudly as the characters.
“Run like hell,” revisited
Which brings me back to Quezon’s line and its shadow. Did he say “Americans”? Often, yes, and that specificity matters; the quote was born in a quarrel with colonial supervision. Did he say “any foreigner”? Sometimes, because he was also building a general case for sovereignty. Did he add, “because however bad a Filipino government might be, we can always change it”? That clause is the hinge; without it, the line is self-harm. With it, the line is a wager on democratic self-correction—and an indictment when we fail to collect.
Quezon doesn’t resolve the paradox; it dramatises it. It shows how an independence movement can midwife a media machine; how a revolution’s laurels can harden into a dynasty’s ceiling fan; how a nation can graduate from colonialism into the subtler captivity of its own appetites. The film’s last beat leaves you with a queasy pride: we did win the right to run ourselves. The hell, when it shows up, is locally sourced.
Coda: the personal is political (and cinematic)
I left the cinema thinking of visas. Of queues at dawn and embassy windows tall enough to make you feel short. Of my mother’s sigh, and of Quezon’s insistence that sovereignty means owning the consequences. The film brought back schoolbook names—Hare–Hawes–Cutting, Tydings–McDuffie—and made them feel less like dates to memorise than levers to pull. It also made me reconsider the cycle we keep dignifying as “vibrant democracy.” Some presidents are good, some are bad; a good one builds a runway, the next taxis back to the terminal. A see-saw isn’t a system; it’s a playground.
And yet—I think Quezon was right, but only if we finish the sentence. A government run like hell by Filipinos is not a wish; it’s a warning. The remedy isn’t nostalgia for a foreign heaven. It’s building the civic muscle to change our own weather. Tarog’s film, for all its classical sweep and occasionally sugary scoring, earns its place in that work: it makes the origin myth uncomfortable, and therefore useful.
Cast call-outs (first mentions)
Manuel L. Quezon (Jericho Rosales); Aurora Quezon (Karylle); Emilio “Miong” Aguinaldo (Mon Confiado); Leonard Wood (Iain Glen); Sergio Osmeña (Romnick Sarmenta); Manuel Roxas (JC Santos); Joven Hernando (Arron Villaflor/Cris Villanueva); Manuel Nieto (Jake Macapagal); Eduardo Rusca (Joross Gamboa); Sergeant Johnston (Nico Locco).
Bottom line
A bracing, handsomely mounted origin story that treats politics as both theatre and knife work—Quezon argues that the tools we used to win independence are the very tools we must learn to restrain.
