FACETS: Joaquin Perocillo and the Forgotten Golden Age of Cebuano Cinema
A 20-minute documentary, a lifetime of history, and a new generation of Filipino filmmakers learning where they come from
By Kobe Janer
October 20, 2026
Between the 1950s and the 1970s, Cebu ran a film industry of its own, one that filled theaters along Colon Street, produced roughly 80 Cebuano language films between 1947 and 1960, and turned Gloria Sevilla and Mat Ranillo Jr. into household names across the Visayas and Mindanao as the Queen and King of Visayan Films. At its peak, demand was so high that productions overlapped back to back, and in 1954 Sevilla and Ranillo founded their own company, S-R Productions, making them among the earliest actor-producers in regional Philippine cinema. Badlis sa Kinabuhi (1969), starring the couple, screened at the Asian Film Festival in Jakarta and later in Berlin, and Sevilla won her first FAMAS Best Actress award for the role. Then Ranillo died in a plane crash that same year, and by the following decade the industry he helped build had struggled to compete with the growing scale of Manila’s film industry and eventually went quiet. Many of the original film reels from that era have since been damaged or destroyed, with most never properly stored or preserved, which means the golden age did not just fade from public memory but from the physical record as well.
Joaquin Perocillo grew up between three provinces before Cebu found him, having spent his earliest years in Muntinlupa and Bacoor, Cavite with roots in Masbate on his father’s side and Rizal on his mother’s, before his family moved to Cebu City in 2011, where he spent the next years growing up, learning Cebuano through VisPop, and falling in love with a city he would eventually try to give something back to. He first learned about Cebuano cinema as a kid looking things up online, and when he went searching for Cebuano films to connect with the way he connected with Cebu’s music, he found almost nothing available. For his thesis at Mapua University, he made a 20-minute documentary called Cinebuano, produced under CILLO Films in collaboration with Kuro-Kuro Productions and Lutaw Studios. “One of the most important things I learned from talking with Chai Fonacier and Suzette Ranillo is how much of Cebuano cinema’s golden age is already lost,” Perocillo tells BLNC. “It made me realize how important it is to keep reminding people of that history, and to keep creating and advocating for it.”
Cinebuano gathers six voices from different generations of Cebu’s film community, including award-winning actress Chai Fonacier, veteran actress-producer Suzette Ranillo (the daughter of Sevilla and Ranillo Jr.), film practitioner and lawyer Grace Marie Lopez, and filmmakers Victor Villanueva, Keith Deligero, and Carl Lara. Through their accounts, the documentary traces the arc of Cebuano cinema from its golden age to its present, and the hopes the people still inside it carry for its future. “I remember Ms. Suzette telling me how busy her parents were back in the day, working on back-to-back, box-office Cebuano films shot in Cebu, premiered and screened in cinemas in Colon, which used to have so many of them,” Perocillo recalls. At one point, Colon Street housed as many as 20 cinemas after the war, anchored by Vision Theatre, an Art Deco landmark built in the 1930s with neoclassical sculptures by Italian artist Dante Guidetti that survived the World War II bombings of Cebu and went on to become one of the premier screening venues of the golden age. Today, those cinemas are gone, some repurposed, some holding nothing more than pirated DVDs where projectors once ran nightly.
Since its premiere at the Binisaya Film Festival in 2023, Cinebuano has traveled to festivals in Manila and Baguio City, winning the World Building Award at the Montañosa Film Festival, sweeping Best Editing, Best Cinematography, and Best Production Design at CiNe-U, and earning Best Thesis at Mapua University in 2023. The awards speak for themselves, but what the documentary does best has nothing to do with trophies. It brings back a picture of Cebu that most people alive today have never seen, a version of the city where movie stars were local, where premieres happened on your own street, where the sidewalks outside the theaters filled with crowds waiting to get in, and where the stories on screen were told in the language you spoke at home. That was Colon Street in the 1950s and 1960s, a stretch of road where cinema was not something you traveled to Manila for but something your city made for itself. “Most people I’ve personally asked told me they only learned about Cebuano cinema’s history and Cebuano cinema in general because of Cinebuano,” Perocillo says.
What Perocillo is doing reflects a wider movement across the country, where regional filmmakers tell stories in their own languages for their own communities, often on limited budgets and with support that comes from within the creative scene itself. Language should not be the barrier it is made out to be, because anyone who has watched a Korean drama or a Japanese anime with subtitles has already proven that not understanding every word does not stop you from feeling every scene, and regional cinema only asks for that same openness except the stories and the places and the lives on screen are ours. “Watching films in other regional languages is a good chance to discover our own culture that we don’t see in mainstream media,” Perocillo tells BLNC. “It shows that Filipino stories aren’t only told from Manila, or in Tagalog.”
Perocillo’s body of work covers more ground than Cinebuano alone, with the short film Cut/Off (Best Music, Sinepiyu XIV 2022) and the Cinemalaya 2023 Shorts Finalist Maudi Nga Arapaap (Last Dream), for which he co-wrote the screenplay and composed the score, both adding to a growing list of credits that span producing, editing, and music composition. He has more in the pipeline, and among his projects in development is a collaboration with Cebu’s creative community that brings musicians, actors, writers, and producers together on a single project, something he calls the most ambitious thing he has planned so far.
For anyone still holding back from sharing their work, Perocillo keeps it direct: “Sometimes our biggest enemy is ourselves, and that fear is what stops us from sharing our work in the first place. But trust me, every artist started out exactly like that, scared. Always remember the start is always rough, so do it scared. Start creating and share it.” And when asked about legacy, his answer is just as clear: “Be proud of where you come from, and not be shy about using your native language in your art. We’re living in an era where people are open to art in any language, so make the most of it. You have an audience, and they will find you if you stay true to yourself.” VisPop already proved that Cebuano art can find its own audience without switching languages, and if that worked for music, there is no reason it cannot work for film. Cebu has the actors, the writers, the directors, the composers, and the stories. What it is still building is the dream of seeing all of that come together again the way it did decades ago, when Bisaya films played to full houses and the people who made them did not have to leave home to be taken seriously. That dream is not as far away as it used to be, and every film made, every screening held, and every viewer who chooses to press play brings it a little closer.
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