How Mag-Iina Grew Out of a Play That Hasn’t Happened Yet

Though born from Guelan Varela-Luarca’s play “Corridors,” the Cinemalaya-winning film “Mag-Iina” took on a distinct identity—reshaping characters, imagery, and story elements while allowing its source material to evolve on its own terms.

Words Gerie Marie Consolacion
Photos courtesy of Mag-Iina
September 11, 2026

Actress Ness Roque as Katte in Mag-Iina

There is an almost backward magic to the story of Mag-Iina, the Cinemalaya awards darling written by Guelan Varela-Luarca and directed by Giancarlo Abrahan. The film exists, audiences watched it, cried through it, argued about it in the group chats. 

Its source material, the stage play Corridors, does not exist yet, not really. 

It has been read in a book, it has been performed twice as a stage reading, actors hunched over music stands in all black, nothing but voices and a single small platform. It has never been fully staged.

So when people ask which came first, the honest answer, according to Luarca, is almost nothing.

During the exclusive interview with the Art Plus Magazine, Luarca says, “Parang ito talaga ay, which came first?” pertaining to the whole tangled chronology. “Wala, it’s, it’s, it’s really ano, parang hirit-basta nung ano, pabalik-balik nung oras.” Back and forth through time, in other words. 

A film born from a play that the film itself may end up rewriting.

Writing Is a Punishment, Adapting Is a Relief

Ask Luarca whether adapting his own work was easier than writing something new, and he laughs before he even answers. “Kahit anong form ng pagsusulat, parusa,” he says. 

Behind the scenes of the filming in Mag-Iina

But this particular punishment, he admits, came easier than most. He wrote Corridors years earlier, in a graduate writing class in the US, and even then his classmates kept telling him the play felt cinematic without him trying. 

“There was something cinematic already with the play itself,” he says. “Of course, I wasn't conscious about it”.

The real work, once he sat down to turn it into a screenplay, was subtraction. Luarca calls himself ‘madaldal’ as a writer, chatty, prone to giving characters too much to say. In the play, characters spoke directly to the audience, narrating their own actions. 

On film, that habit had nowhere to hide. “Syempre tatanggalin ‘yon sa film, kasi sa film nakikita na natin,” he says. 

Almost all of that direct address disappeared, except for one holdover: the character of Katte still turns to the camera to announce which day it is, across the three-day span the film covers, plus a closing voice-over. Everything else, the running commentary that made the play a play, got left on the cutting room floor of the script itself.

The Hardest Thing to Let Go? Almost Nothing

You would expect a writer to bleed a little over cut lines. Luarca says he doesn't remember any. “Kung ang qualifier ay hardest, parang wala namang hard to let go,” he says. “Medium is king, ‘di ba? Kung ano ‘yong kailangan nung medium, nung cinema, eh ‘di pwedeng i-let go.”

Behind the scenes of the filming in Mag-Iina

Abrahan, who directed, misses something more specific: a moment in the play with no language at all, where the action suddenly skips forward and every character on stage gasps at once. “Merong parang humihinga nang sabay-sabay,” he says, “nangingisay ‘yong lahat ng characters nang sabay-sabay.” 

He never found a way to translate that pure, wordless gesture into film language, and he suspects it will find its way back when Corridors finally gets staged. “The thing that we were not able to keep was actually the thing that did not carry language,” he says, “but a gesture that was something very, at least to me, beautiful and powerful.”

Luarca has his own theory about the difference in their attachment to the source material. “Part I did feel at parts na parang Gian was more maternal towards the original than I was,” he says, laughing. “That was reassuring na parang I was more ready to kill the baby, tapos si Gian ‘yong parang, ‘Wait, pero interesting ‘yon, ‘di ba?’”

Birds, Crushed Flowers, and a House With No Corridors

Not everything in Mag-Iina came from the play. Some of the film’s most striking images were born entirely out of production problems.

Behind the scenes of the filming in Mag-Iina

Exhibit A: The ending. Corridors ends with Anj and Katte literally getting lost in the house’s hallways, the image that gives the play its title. The house the filmmakers eventually scouted and fell in love with had no hallways at all. 

“Walang corridors,” Luarca says, still sounding a little amused by the irony. Solving that problem sent the two writers down what Luarca calls ‘a malalim na rabbit hole,’ which led them back to the opening line of a song already quoted in the play: “Umaga na, umaga na, nag-aawitan ang ibon sa parang.” 

The birds in the fields. That single lyric became a recurring image threaded all the way from an early dream sequence to Katte’s late monologue about longing for home, and finally into the film's new ending outside the house altogether.

“Problem solving gives birth to poetry,” Luarca says. “Pwede pala ‘yon, na parang problem solving actually, instead of making, compromising the material, strengthens the material.”

Another invention entirely absent from the play: Katte urinating on the family’s chicken dinner, a scene Abrahan is quick to blame on Luarca with a laugh. It grew out of an earlier, more restrained idea, an image of Ysobel tending a garden of flowers that Katte would later crush in rebellion. 

But once it was on the page, it felt too polite. “I found something quite boring about it,” Abraham says. “I wanted something more naughty, more mischievous.” What survived is a small act of anarchy standing in for a much bigger one.

A Family Tree of Actresses

Long before Janine Gutierrez, Agot Isidro, Jackie Lou Blanco, and Cherry Pie Picache took their places in Mag-Iina, the material passed through the hands of an entirely different cast, including Dolly de Leon, in earlier stage readings. 

Actors Lucas Andalio as Yñigo and Cherry Pie Picache as Ysobel in Mag-Iina

Luarca is careful to explain that dropping her character from the film wasn’t a snub so much as a deliberate act of identity-building. “We wanted them to have very different identities,” he says of the play and film casts. “It's about mothers than about the architecture. 'No, so meron kaming malinaw na ano na, dito ‘to nanggaling, but it is also its own work.”

There was even an earlier iteration before that, a reading with mostly Filipino American actors in the US, and a book launch where Agot Isidro read the role of Ysobel and Jackie Lou Blanco read Mita, purely as a one-off event. 

By the time the film cast came together, Abraham saw something almost fated in it. He and Luarca had once dreamed, half-jokingly, of casting Janine Gutierrez opposite the late Pilita Corrales, Janine’s real-life grandmother, in a nod to the blood ties running through the story. 

That never happened. What did happen still carries a version of that instinct: real family history quietly reflected inside a story about mothers and daughters. “Blood really has something to do also with the play,” Abrahan says. “Having someone with blood relations to her felt like a very fortuitous, serendipitous decision.”

Faithful, But Not Beholden

Neither writer describes the adaptation process as agonized. “Malinaw sa akin na it is its own work na may sarili din siyang buhay,” Abrahan says. “Kaya iba din ang cast. Malinaw siya.”

Actress Agot Isidro as Mita in Mag-Iina

Luarca agrees there was little overthinking involved, mostly because the material had lived in him so long he barely needed to reread the script. “I never re-read the play,” he says. “It was just there when I needed lines.”

Abrahan traces this ease back to a working philosophy he already applied to his own earlier scripts written for other directors: once you hand a story over, you have to let the person making it feel it as their own. 

He points to the reverse situation, Luarca’s own stage adaptation of Abrahan’s film Dagitab, where Abrahan’s only real instruction was refreshingly loose: change even the characters’ names if you need to. 

“Obviously, it was a very faithful adaptation,” Gian says, “but I think meron kaming excitement also to be in the present moment. It’s not about looking back. It’s not about a false sense of being beholden to something that came before.”

The Play That Doesn’t Exist Yet

Perhaps the most disorienting thing about talking to Luarca and Abrahan is how firmly Luarca insists the play still isn’t real. “Sa utak ko, sa simple kong pag-iisip, wala pang Corridors,” he says. “Pero, mayroong Mag-Iina.” 

Actress Janine Gutierrez as Anj in Mag-Iina

The film, he says, is finished, permanent, watchable. The play remains a script he is still revising, one that will keep changing until opening night, shaped in part by notes from actors who have now seen the finished film and come back with feedback of their own. “Ang film, film siya,” he says. “Ang play, abangan. Kasi wala pa.”

Winning at Cinemalaya, Abrahan adds, was never really the finish line. It was leverage. “Kailangan mo matalo kasi kung hindi, walang play,” he jokes, quoting a producer friend’s gallows humor about award-season logic. 

The win, both agree, makes it far more likely that Corridors will finally get a full staging, closing a loop that started with a play nobody would fund as a film, then became a film, and may soon, at last, become the play it was always meant to be.

The Line That Stays

Asked for a favorite moment, Luarca lands immediately on a monologue: Ysobel whispering into her mother’s ear about Golgotha, about how you can never truly leave the house you come from. “You don't know who you are, na akala mo matatakasan mo ‘yong pamamahay na 'to,” he recalls. 

Actors Agot Isidro as Mita and Janine Gutierrez as Anj in Mag-Iina

“But wherever you go, you will carry this house with you.” He wrote it not long after the 2022 elections, working through his own disorientation about the results. “That monologue that happens later in the play came out very painfully when I was writing it,” he says, “because I was talking to myself.”

Abrahan’s answer circles something quieter and darker: unconditional love, and how far family loyalty can be stretched before it curdles into something else. “The film really questions even our notion of what it means,” he says. 

“Hanggang saan tayo dapat magpatawad kahit pamilya pa ‘yan? I think one of the most important lines in the film is that, how sinister even unconditional love can be.”

It is, in the end, a fitting note for a project that keeps refusing to sit still, a film that outran its own play, a house that grew birds where its corridors used to be, and two writers still arguing, gently and happily, about how faithful faithfulness really needs to be.