29/09/2026
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βForgotten Islandβ: What It Means to Forget
Filipinos have a short memory.
It is easy to forgive and forget when there are cracks in our bravado, and we do it all the timeβin our electoral cycles, as we push the same last names into seats of power, or in how easily we abandon yesterdayβs stories when something newer and shinier captures our attention, discarding them for the next bright distraction. We suffer from our self-inflicted amnesia, a collective resistance to recollecting what has once done us harm.
But memory is no ephemeral novelty.
And the Filipinos of the past once knew this by heart. Our ancestors wove our history into textiles and pottery; each strand of the tapestry harkens back to the echoes of long-forgotten narratives. They engraved their traditions into bamboo, leaving behind evidence of records, laws, and poetry. The body itself was made to remember, carving the skin with adornments that recorded identity, status, and achievements. Entire generations were immortalized into song and dance, passing down the stories through oral tradition and rituals.
We once knew what it meant to forget. We preserved our memory, keeping our culture and traditions in physical materials meant to be discovered along the line, or keeping them alive through stories passed from mouth to ear, shared and retold across time.
DreamWorksβ "Forgotten Island" is a meditation on remembering. Told through the story of childhood best friends Josephine βJoβ Yuson and Raissa Molina, it asks a question that has long echoed in the chambers of our social periphery: who do we become when we forget?
Polar opposites in every way, Jo and Raissa are two ends of the spectrum, yet their diverging points only serve to bring them closer. Intelligent and academically driven, Raissa is on the fast track to a university in the United States, a fact she struggles to tell her chaotic, artistic counterpart, Jo. Having been closely stitched together for almost all their lives, the pair are threatened by separationβone that dares to put an ocean between them. On the night of Raissaβs departure, they stumble upon the fantastical world they have been dreaming of since they were children: Nakali. When they awaken with no recollection of the last 12 hours, they are swept into an adventure to retrace their steps across the island, encountering mythical creatures from Philippine folklore.
Forgotten Island is as vivid as the π£π’π―π₯π¦π³πͺπ΅π’π΄ that flutter in the wind when the festivals roll around, or as bright as the lyrics crawling across the screen of a karaoke machine. With an animation style that draws inspiration from the Tagalog-dubbed anime that played on our televisions, it becomes a technicolor of our shared summer childhoods that collide with the universal themes of friendship, remembrance, and community.
Little pieces of Filipino culture are scattered throughout the film, going beyond the myths that take center stage. Although valid criticism can be drawn from the main charactersβ Western-accented English while the minor characters speak with a heavy Filipino accent, it is still an earnest celebration of Filipino identityβone that celebrates the potential for these narratives to be carried beyond our shores.
The explosion of Forgotten Island marks a bold leap in Filipino storytelling, daring to brute-force space for Filipino stories in global cinema. It is powered by Filipino creatives, animators, and writers coming together to celebrate a culture that has survived colonization, shifting regimes, and the relentless passage of time.
The film strips away the superficial caricatures that persist in the global imagination to reveal the nuance in our realities. The wild world of Nakali thus becomes a monument to our eternal paradoxβa nation carved out of once solitary islands, each as distinct as the last, yet bound by shared heartaches, victories, and joys.
If the power of memory is everlasting, then our stories should be too.
In remembering who we are, we must give room for our legacies to be preserved beyond structures, stone, or crumbling towers that will eventually be toppled.
For people who so often forget, the film repeats what many of us have been saying all along: to remember is to endure.
It is a lesson our ancestors taught us, and it is one that Forgotten Island seeks to reiterate. Even the smallest moments carry a power of their own. What, then, of lifetimes shaped by a shared identity?
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Written by Jafia Verdida
Edited by Rhian Javier
Visuals by Corine Madeline Lingaolingao
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