MANILA, Philippines — There is one scene in Baby Ruth Villarama’s Food Delivery: Fresh from the West Philippine Sea that, for a short moment, allows viewers to take a breather from the current tension in the high seas.

It’s when a Zambales fisherman reflects on the dangers of a profession that many like him were born into. “Meron talagang kinukuha dito na mga tao (These are the times when the sea takes people),” he says, glancing quick at the camera.

They’re about to embark on another weeks-long journey into the rough but bountiful waters west of the Philippines. They have a side mission, too: the search for their four missing neighbors. (The four have yet to be found, as of the film’s screening — months after initial search efforts were launched by government forces and their neighbors.) 

In a film jam-packed with action, rich narratives, and breathtaking footage of the West Philippine Sea and Philippine-occupied islands, it’s that moment of quiet that stands out — a poignant reminder that the sea is even more vast than we can comprehend and for all our efforts to claim or control it, it exists in a timeline of its own. 

Food Delivery: Fresh from the West Philippine Sea, nearly three-month labor of love from the veteran documentary film maker and her team, is as much a witness to the struggles of the “guardians of the West Philippine Sea” as it is tribute to the men and women who’ve sacrificed months, even years of their lives, in defense of what former president Rodrigo Duterte once derided as mere rocks. 

The problem, however, is that the film is nowhere to be seen in the Philippines — for now, at least. 

Food Delivery was supposed to debut in mid-March 2025, as part of the 2025 Puregold CinePanalo Film Festival’s lineup. At the last minute, the film was pulled out of the festival due to supposed “external factors.” The Directors’ Guild of the Philippines, Inc. has criticized the festival organizers for choosing to “suppress the truth — seemingly to avoid disfavor from powerful foreign interests.” 

It was in an intimate theater in Quezon City, instead, where Food Delivery got its debut. 

A small group of people brought together by the Center for Information Resilience and Integrity Studies and the team behind the film watched the documentary in full for the first time in early May — to offer feedback and several rounds of applause for what I think is among the best in capturing the complexities and humanity of the Philippines’ struggles in the West Philippine Sea. 

Censored by whom? And over what? 

When Villarama speaks of the film’s disrupted March 14 premiere, there’s nary a trace of bitterness. The documentarist, whose Sunday Beauty Queen was among the darlings of the 2016 Metro Manila Film Festival, prefers to look forward. After all, she first has to figure out just how and when Food Delivery is to be screened in the Philippines. 

There’s no explicit mention, too, of who or what would have compelled the original festival’s organizations to stop its screening.  

But in the West Philippine Sea, Manila only truly has to deal with one antagonist. China insists that the 2016 Arbitral Award isn’t valid. Out at sea, this has meant that the China Coast Guard consistently drives away Philippine vessels, including the tiny wooden ships of fisherfolk, from key features in the vast waters of the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. 

Beijing claims almost all of the South China Sea, including features that are well within the 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone of Manila. 

Who actually owns Scarborough Shoal, a high-tide elevation, is technically still up in the air. But Beijing has maintained control of the shoal since 2012, or after a standoff between China and the Philippines. 

“Control” of the shoal means Filipino fisherfolk are almost never able to access its lagoon — where fish once used to be plentiful and where waters are calm, even during a storm. Beijing isn’t supposed to do this — pending arbitration, or (by some miracle) a bilateral or multilateral agreement to determine who has sovereignty over the shoal, fisherfolk from the Philippines, China, Taiwan, and Vietnam should be able to access it, since it’s traditional fishing grounds. 

Yet, little has changed for Zambales fisherfolk who once frequented the shoal. Things have teetered between just slightly better (being able to fish 30 nautical miles away sans harassment) or progressively worse. 

Food Delivery doesn’t shy away from telling it as it is — soldiers worry about paying off their debt and fisherfolk say access to the shoal is more important than just “rocks.” Fisherfolk are also forthright about how it’s become near-impossible to make a profit or even a living, no thanks to imported fish that only drive prices down. 

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has promised, repeatedly, that he would “not preside over any process that will abandon even a square inch of territory of the Republic of the Philippines.” 

The West Philippine Sea is ours, Atin Ito — so goes the battlecry. 

Food Delivery helps viewers better understand what refusing to yield means — fathers who have to leave in the middle of the night for yet another long maritime deployment, to haul supplies from the mainland, to Navy ships, then to the remote outposts across the West Philippine Sea where soldiers stay for months at a time. 

Food Delivery is for children, Villarama explains with a smile. It’s especially for the children of the soldiers they interviewed — so their sons and daughters could understand why papa had to leave in the middle of the night without saying goodbye, or why it was near impossible to talk to papa whenever they wanted. – Rappler.com 

Food Delivery: Fresh from the West Philippine Sea is set to make its international debut in New Zealand in June. The writer was able to watch this version of the document through an invitation from the Center for Information Resilience and Integrity Studies