By Misaki F. Koizumi
#Refreshments: There are forms of love that are like water — still on the surface, yet deep enough to drown in. Sometimes, they move like a current, carrying us so far from the shore until we no longer know how to find our way back. In ‘Ganito, Ganyan, Ganoon’ (2026), director-writer Cholo Laurel explores what remains between a mother and a daughter after years of absence, telling a story about the struggle to navigate feelings too painful to put into words.
The film revolves around Paz (played by Agot Isidro) and her daughter Joanne (played by Jodi Sta. Maria), whose reunion is far from simply finding their way back to each other. What should have been a heartwarming return instead forces Joanne to confront how much of Paz, and the life her mother built without her, has become foreign.
Joanne has come a long way from the 10-year-old girl that Paz once left behind. Over the years, she has built dreams of her own and carved out a career writing for television. In a world where she creates stories for other people, she also learned to build a life without her mother. So when she learned that Paz had returned to their home country, welcoming her mother back did not come easily.
Paz’s return also brings Joanne face-to-face with her half-brother Matti (played by Gabriel Lazaro). Although Matti spent his whole life in America with Paz, their mother-son relationship was far from ordinary. When Matti nearly drowns at sea and is pulled to safety by Joanne and Rene, Joanne’s father (played by Gardo Versosa), Paz’s worry comes through in the form of scolding and shouting at her son.
For the first time, Joanne caught a glimpse of the mother she never got to know — one whose love, despite being present, could also feel suffocating. In their reunion, the siblings begin to understand that they had their own versions of Paz, shaped by the different choices she made for each of them.
From Matti’s perspective, Paz’s love was something he came to know through her constant presence. Even when she yells at him, he could still recognize the care beneath her anger. During their long walks in New York, she would fill the distance with stories from the Philippines, often bringing up Joanne and how much she resembled her. Then, she would fall quiet for blocks.
To Matti, these silences were louder than anything Paz had ever shouted, because beyond the distance was a mother who still carried her daughter with her. What Joanne had known as absence, Matti had come to see as a love that never quite learned how to show itself.
The weight of Joanne’s relationship with Paz resurfaces even as she tries to maintain the life she has carefully built. Through sessions with a psychiatrist and scenes of her anxiety, the audience witnesses her slowly learning to understand her own mind after years of being isolated by loss.
Rather than treating support as something reserved for a breaking point, the film makes it part of Joanne’s self-care, an aspect of mental health that is still rarely portrayed in Philippine cinema.
In Filipino culture, forgiving one’s family is often treated as an obligation — a love expected to endure, no matter how deeply it has been wounded. For Joanne, however, blood does not erase the pain, nor does the title of ‘mother’ make 27 years of absence disappear.
That is what makes Joanne and Paz’s first reunion heavy. In the bathroom, a space usually private and ordinary, the two finally face each other. Yet instead of finding comfort in finally seeing the person she lived so long without, Joanne’s first instinct was to escape.
With Paz feeling like a stranger to Joanne, perhaps the film asks what remains between a mother and child after years of distance. How does someone learn to be a mother after being absent from their child’s life for far too long?
As the story unfolds, Laurel challenges the idea of Paz as simply a bad mother. He does not erase her responsibility, but reveals who she was before motherhood defined so much of her life.
This is where Paz’s successful career as an actress is revealed. Her story became more complicated when the audience realized how marriage and motherhood asked her to surrender parts of that life. She was not simply a mother who chose herself over her daughter; she was also a woman trying to reconcile with the person she once was amid being expected to fulfill her role as a wife and mother.
Perhaps this is what humanizes Paz. Her choices still caused Joanne pain, and the film never asks us to forget that. But by giving us a glimpse of what existed beyond those choices, Laurel allows Paz to become more than the mother who turned her back on her family.
Yet Paz was not the only woman forced to choose between her dreams and the person she loved.
When Paz returned, she diminished Joanne’s acceptance into a prestigious New York fellowship, claiming that her daughter’s talent came from her. Still, when her mother needed her, Joanne set that opportunity aside to care for her.
In that moment, the daughter becomes a mirror of her mother. Both women possess big dreams and, ironically, both know what it means to sacrifice themselves for people they love. But while Paz eventually chose to leave, Joanne chose to stay. For 27 years, they had lived with the same absence, only from opposite sides.
This divide surfaces quietly in their exchange over old photographs. Joanne sees their lack of pictures together as another reminder of the years Paz was away. Paz, however, reveals that she was often the one behind the camera. What Joanne sees as proof of absence becomes, in another light, a trace of presence.
The photographs cannot make up for the years they lost, but they reveal that love had existed alongside the distance. Perhaps that is what makes the film’s portrayal of family so affecting: love can be real without making its pain any less real.
If Joanne and Paz struggle to understand each other, the half-siblings find an easier connection. Matti and Joanne become a source of comfort for each other, but Matti’s own pain eventually surfaces during a family gathering, when he reveals that he has been living with depression and bipolar disorder.
When the possibility of suicide was brought into the open, the conversation became more than an attempt to understand Matti. For once, the family had to stop asking why he behaved the way he did and began asking what he had been carrying all along. It forced Paz to listen to a pain that had been present long before she knew how to name it, and recognize that there were parts of her son’s suffering she could not simply love away by being his mother.
After all their differences, the film does not erase the possibility that Paz left something good behind in her daughter. One of those moments comes quietly by the sea, with the wind blowing and waves endlessly breaking against the shore. Joanne sits trying to piece together the story she is writing, and instead of criticizing her, Paz tries to understand.
She tells Joanne that a story should not simply be a list of things that need to happen. It has to be lived, felt, and followed wherever it chooses to go. In that moment, Paz finally recognizes the person Joanne has become without her — the writer she became.
But perhaps Paz’s advice was never only about writing.
When Paz reveals that she has liver cancer and has returned to the Philippines to die, reconciliation did not suddenly become easy. Joanne did not forget what happened simply because their time together was running out. Instead, she chose to care for her mother while time still permitted her to know her.
For years, Joanne had learned to keep her life under control. She had to be intelligent, strong, and dependable because no one else was left to do those things for her. But as the story draws to its end, she begins to understand that some things cannot be fully grasped in her hands — the return of her mother, her illness, and her once again looming departure.
Here, the film intentionally redefines what healing can look like. Reconciliation does not need to undo the past to be genuine. After all, Paz cannot reclaim 27 years in such a short time.
She cannot return to all the milestones and ordinary days she missed spending with her daughter. But in their remaining time together, they begin to share the simple things that should have belonged to them all along — a family photograph, a meal at the same table, and the experience of a mother being cared for by the daughter who once needed her.
When Joanne finally acknowledged Paz as her mother for the first time, the moment did not become a grand scene demanding the film’s full attention. Its quietness makes it even more powerful. She did not forgive because the anger had disappeared; she simply learned that it is possible to love even with the wound still there.
And when the film returns to water in its final moments, everything that came before takes on a new meaning. From the start, water represents emotions swallowed down, memories that cannot be escaped, and thoughts that grow heavier the longer they are kept inside.
Joanne, who has spent much of her life drowning in anger and longing, eventually floats.
Ganito, Ganyan, Ganoon does not teach us that forgiveness means forgetting, nor that coming to understand why someone hurt us somehow takes away our right to be hurt. Instead, it allows two truths to exist at once — you can love someone without excusing where they failed you.
As Joanne floats, she does not leave her past behind. She carries Paz — the pain of being her daughter and their love that was never easy to define. She also carries Matti, the brother who stood beside her as they faced the family that both shaped and wounded them.
The water does not become shallow simply because Joanne has learned to stay above it. Its current still carries traces of everything that came before, even when the surface has grown still. And maybe this is what healing looks like — not wounds drying up, nor its depths disappearing, but learning to move through life’s current without drowning.
(Photo courtesy of Philippine Concerts)