Five minutes into Food Delivery: Fresh from the West Philippine Sea, the latest documentary from Filipino filmmaker Baby Ruth Villarama, we are presented with a patchwork of news headlines, archived footage depicting Filipino and Chinese maritime vessels ramming into each other, and graphics mapping the Philippines’ nautical borders. A propulsive score and soundbites from diplomatic briefings accommodate the visual paraphernalia. The sequence paints a striking picture of Philippine waters as a geopolitical battleground. An intertitle towards the film’s end affirms this, citing the 2016 ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), which declared that China’s claim to maritime resources within its so-called nine-dash line, alongside its artificial island construction in the West Philippine Sea, is a violation of international law. Nearly a decade since the landmark ruling, the Chinese government has continued its large-scale reclamation of the contested waters, especially under the administration of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who now faces trial at the International Criminal Court over crimes against humanity.
Shot over 60 days with a lean crew, Food Delivery was slated to premiere at the 2025 Puregold CinePanalo Film Festival as its first full-length documentary title, but two days prior to its hotly anticipated screening, it was axed from the festival lineup due to “external factors.” “As for whether it’s a form of censorship, I would say it certainly feels like it,” Villarama said in a Rappler interview in March.
Food Delivery is the latest documentary slapped with censorship in the Philippines. Last year, Bryan Brazil’s Lost Sabungeros, which traces the disappearance of Filipino cockfighting aficionados in 2021, had its premiere canned by the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, citing “security concerns,” before the film eventually screened at the QCinema International Film Festival. Cinemalaya was also under fire for the alleged screening sabotage of Seán Devlin’s Asog, a docudrama about the forceful expulsion of Sicogon Island residents due to corporate interests. At the same time, JL Burgos’ Alipato at Muog, which tells the enforced disappearance of his brother Jonas Burgos for nearly two decades, faced a public viewing ban after its Cinemalaya premiere. The ruling, which states that the film “tends to undermine the faith and confidence of the people in their government,” was imposed by the country’s Movie and Television Review and Classification Board, which later rescinded its decision following protests.
On June 30, 2025, Villarama’s fourth feature film finally had its world premiere at The Capitol Cinema in Auckland, New Zealand as part of the Oscar-qualifying Doc Edge Festival, where it recently won the Tides of Change prize, which is given to works with global and social relevance. However, just days after the documentary’s debut, the Chinese Consulate General in Auckland reportedly asked the festival organizers to cancel the rest of its screenings, arguing that the film “is rife with disinformation and false propaganda, serving as a political tool for [the] Philippines to pursue illegitimate claims in the South China Sea,” all the while reiterating Beijing’s position that the 2016 arbitral ruling is “illegal, null and void.” Festival board members and ticketing staff also received calls following the written appeal. But Doc Edge stood its ground, maintaining “the festival’s independence and curatorial freedom,” which was backed by New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At this rate, it seems like it won’t be the last effort to block the 82-minute documentary from public viewing, which only heightens the topic’s urgency. Until now, Food Delivery has yet to land a major distributor in the Philippines.
The film’s title decidedly speaks of its premise. The documentary tracks the stories of local fisherfolk and service personnel, specifically those from the national Coast Guard and the Navy, as they repel China’s heightened militarization and aggression in the West Philippine Sea, all the while delivering important supplies to people on and offshore. For the fisherfolk, the sea is a source of sustenance and livelihood; for the uniformed men, it evokes a sense of pride and duty. Throughout the movie, we see that every encounter is an exercise of power: In the air, high-tech Chinese drones hover, surveilling the movement of maritime personnel during secret rotation and resupply missions. On the water, foreign ships patrol and line the coast, circling local fishermen in small motorized boats and hosing them down. It’s a classic image of intruders driving off the natives from their own territory.
It’s so convenient to describe the central struggle that the documentary captures as a “dispute,” “tension,” or “conflict”—in the same way that Israel’s Zionist occupation of Palestine is peddled as a “war” instead of genocide or ethnic cleansing (of course, I’m not equating the two)—when it is clearly a violent encroachment that poses economic, political, and cultural consequences, an illegal expansion that could be traced back to the 1995 incident in the Mischief Reef, which is well within the 200-nautical-mile reach of the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. When geopolitical and human rights issues are constantly framed as mere “conflict,” it deliberately obscures a sense of positionality and the power imbalance often embedded in such issues, insisting on a kind of faux-liberal thinking where the Program for Peace abandons accountability and social justice.
There’s a kind of spectacle that revs up the movie as it luxuriates in a mix of wide, overhead, and underwater shots, fascinated with the blazing glow of the disputed waters and the rich marine life that it shelters. Here, the camera mimics the sights it photographs: fluid, unsteady, following the subjects on foot, and at times out of focus. Often we see it fixated on speedboats racing to deliver supplies and visit remote islands, or on the uninvited ships hovering around local fishers’ artisanal watercraft. Every time a confrontation unfolds, there’s a thrilling anxiety that creeps up on the viewer, with music by Emerzon Texon whose rhythms migrate between calm and imposing.
By the time Food Delivery trains the camera on the fisherfolk living near the Scarborough Shoal, Villarama’s steadfast humanism shines, extracting a perspective often rendered irrelevant by legal and diplomatic talks. Among the featured fishermen is Arnel Satam, who made national headlines in 2023 when he tried to outrun a Chinese vessel blocking access to the Panatag Shoal, another name for Scarborough. Apart from enduring the threat to his family’s living resource, Satam wrestles with medical concerns that many fishermen like him can hardly afford. Health services in the islands are scarce too. Other fisherfolk in the film recount stories of hardship as the vast sea can sometimes be unforgiving, forcing them to risk entering fishing grounds heavily guarded by Chinese coast guards, or sail despite dangerous weather conditions. Four Zambales-based fishermen, in fact, went missing near Scarborough Shoal in December last year, leading to continuous search operations.
Small-scale fisherfolk find it hard to break even as local markets have to compete with the government’s fish imports, sinking many of them deeper into debt. Their dreams are small, but progress in this corner of the archipelago unfortunately comes in increments. Fear does not gnaw at them as much as hunger does. “If we’re going to starve to death, then I’m fighting,” a fisherman tells the camera.
Elsewhere in her filmography, Villarama waxes eloquent about social inequities and stories of people on the fringes through a humanist approach, with a particular taste for the raw and earnest. In her feature directorial debut, Jazz in Love (2013), she tells the story of a Filipino gay man in the throes of living in a foreign land and learning a foreign language to be with the man he loves dearly but cannot marry in a country whose government doesn’t recognize his civil rights. Little Azkals (2014) is a gorgeously photographed underdog story about a group of soccer kids, selected across the Philippines, who underwent training in Britain for the 2019 World Cup. In Sunday Beauty Queen (2016), which world premiered at the 21st Busan International Film Festival, Villarama explores the painstaking realities of labor migration and transnational capital as the picture follows several Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong as they spend their lone rest day organizing a beauty pageant.
Villarama’s movies are chiefly shot with a tendency to plead for remembrance, uniformly layered with closing intertitles that heighten each picture’s message and the predicaments of their subjects, blocks of texts that double as transparent invocations of hope and sympathy. Broad catharsis, then, is almost immediately achieved. But the filmmaker knows better than to regurgitate the nastiest narratives about the disenfranchised, even as her works, at times, struggle to interrogate questions past the individual lens. In Food Delivery, even the soldiers, who belong to an institution eroded by its violent past, are not presented in mythic terms. The film focuses on their labor, the personal cost of living on the front lines of a geopolitical issue, especially against a global superpower. Life at sea is precarious and visceral. Poor cellular coverage prohibits a serviceman from sending money to his family, another battles homesickness. And yet, somehow, they make it work.
In interviews, the director consistently emphasizes that the film eschews politics and only concerns itself with the stories of the Filipino fisherfolk and maritime personnel defending the West Philippine Sea. Though I find it rather flimsy as the decision to “shine the lens on the people” is in and of itself political, that thinking is almost decidedly baked into the documentary. Nearly an hour into the film, during a sit-down with local residents who are discussing the fate of the missing fishermen, a woman mentions that in case their comrades are rescued by Chinese authorities, it’s up to the populist Philippine President Bongbong Marcos to speak to them. This juncture presents an opportunity to probe further into the politics of the film’s subjects and what they think about the extent of the government’s promise of security to civilians living on the country’s nautical edges, but the camera instead cuts to another scene, hesitant to engage in such complexity.
Furthermore, one of the key findings of the 2016 PCA ruling, detailed in a 501-page document, includes the environmental impact of Beijing’s large-scale land reclamation, which it says “caused severe harm to the coral reef environment and violated its obligation to preserve and protect fragile ecosystems.” But we don’t really see the film entertaining such a standpoint. A question to ask is whether the film is blissfully unaware of the inseparable connection of China’s encroachment, as with other global superpowers’ colonial projects, to climate justice, or if it simply refuses to acknowledge the link. Either way, it kneecaps the picture’s critical edges.
Interstitial information often punctuates the film’s images, though, to its credit, nowhere does it suggest that it functions as an exhaustive resource material about the maritime “tension.” If anything, the goal of Food Delivery is simple: to put a face to a complex, decades-long geopolitical struggle. It trades marquee names often adept at facing the camera for ordinary, laboring lives rarely filmed or written about, packaged via a largely fly-on-the-wall treatment. It is less about a sense of nationalism whose configurations are often abstract and misplaced than about dealing with material violence so routinely, so casually. What recurs in the film is the quiet dignity and solidarity of the local fisherfolk, a community connected by water, which then speaks of a maritime consciousness that’s long been entrenched in the common Filipino way of life before it was muddled by colonial empires.
Near the film’s end, Satam nails the Philippine flag to a makeshift floating device. He makes sure that it holds. “No one can remove that,” a fellow fisher tells him. “That’s for Scarborough,” he responds. The watercraft drifts away. The camera zooms out, depicting the boundless enormity of the unsparing sea and the granular lives that depend on it. The soundscape swells. There’s an irony in the distance of the shot that inevitably bleeds into the frantic reality of the film—forced to seek harbor elsewhere just to tell stories of struggle on our own shores. Here is the Philippines seen from the waters that sustain it.
Food Delivery recently premiered at the Doc Edge festival.
Learn more about the film at the Doc Edge site for the title.
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