DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 5 April) — For young filmmaker Bea Bianca Allado of Tagum City, storytelling begins in a place both urgent and intimate: the need to understand what freedom looks like when it feels just out of reach.

Her latest short film, When Birds Can’t Fly, recently won multiple awards at the Montañosa Film Festival in Baguio City, including the Kidlat Gottlieb Kalayaan De Guia Kapwa Award which she received from National Artist Kidlat Tahimik; the Cine Goma Award for Young Cinema, and The Film Academy Visions and Voices Award. 

As the sole Mindanawon in her category, Allado’s recognition signals a growing presence of regional voices in national film spaces.

Learning to speak in images

Allado’s relationship with film began early, shaped by a quiet yet persistent fascination with the medium.

“Ever since I was young, I’ve loved films,” the 21-year old filmmaker said, recalling early mornings spent watching Disney and Pixar animated movies, and trading CDs with classmates. “Because of this, I dreamed of creating my own films,” she spoke, explaining how what initially started as a hobby slowly turned into curiosity. “I became curious about the process of making short films,” curious about how films are made, and, eventually, how stories are built.

She describes her entry into filmmaking as gradual but deliberate. While she experimented with filmmaking in high school, it was only in recent years that she began taking the craft more seriously. “I don’t really consider the short films I made during my high school years, since they didn’t follow the proper filmmaking process,” she laughed.

She eventually joined workshops affiliated with the Film Development Council of the Philippines and learned from established filmmakers.

Her previous work titled Lawod, engaged with the theme of mental health among men. In When Birds Can’t Fly, Allado turns to another deeply personal terrain: the lived experiences of persons with disabilities (PWDs), especially women.

For Allado, filmmaking is both a creative outlet, and a way of locating herself within the world.

“I create short films not only because it is my passion, but also as a way to express my voice and advocate for specific communities,” she said.

Between limitation and possibility

For Allado, this search for voice is both deeply personal and shaped by where she stands — as a member of the PWD community and a Mindanawon filmmaker navigating how stories are told, and who gets to tell them.

“I recognize my limitations, but I refuse to let them define or confine me,” she stressed. “Instead, they push me to keep searching for my own sense of freedom.”

This search is both personal, and shaped by place. As a member of the PWD community and Mindanawon filmmaker, Allado is conscious of the weight — and the possibility — of representing these local textures and hidden realities to a wider audience.

“As someone who belongs to the PWD community due to mental health reasons — and having a family who is also part of that community — I am deeply aware of these realities,” she shared.

That awareness informs how she approaches her work. In When Birds Can’t Fly, she sought to move away from narratives that frame persons with disabilities as passive or defined by a lack.

“Drawing from my own experiences, I wanted to ensure that the character is never portrayed as someone to be pitied, but as someone with agency, dreams, and the power to choose her own path,” she said. “For me, authenticity comes from showing both the struggles and the strength that coexist in that reality.”

At the same time, place remains central to her storytelling. “My regional context deeply shapes the way I tell stories — through the language I use, the culture I reflect, and the spaces I choose to portray,” she noted.

“By grounding my film in my own place, I wanted to showcase the beauty of Mindanao — not just through its visuals, but through its voice,” she explained. “It’s important for me to bring that authenticity to a national platform, to let our stories be seen and heard in a way that is true to who we are.”

When Birds Can’t Fly: Freedom, as it is imagined

At the center of Allado’s work is tension — between limitation and possibility, between lived reality and imagined freedom.

The starting point for When Birds Can’t Fly came from a personal conflict during the summer of 2025, a moment she turned into a narrative. “Writing stories,” she said, “has always been my way of coping with distress; it’s where I find comfort.”

According to Allado, When Birds Can’t Fly, at its core, asks a deceptively simple question: What does freedom look like for someone whose circumstances seem to limit it?

The film follows a protagonist — Shela — who has paraplegia, and whose connection with an injured bird becomes a starting point for imagining movement, choice, and self-determination.

Visually, this tension unfolds across two distinct worlds. The film moves between a lived-in, real-world bedroom — intimate, familiar, cluttered — and the more minimal, animated space that reflects Shela’s inner life. In these sequences, she appears as a white, translucent, monoline figure: simplified, almost see-through, embodying, in Allado’s words, “vulnerability, introspection, and the sense of being both present and unseen.”

“The grounded, lived-in bedroom reflects her daily life … limited and sometimes confining,” Allado said. “In contrast, the minimal animated world represents her imagination, emotions, and mental space.”

The contrast is deliberate. While the physical world is small and cluttered, the animated space opens up into something vast yet empty — a landscape of possibility also marked by isolation.  Sound further distinguishes the two: “In the real-world scenes, the audio is quiet and restrained,” Allado described, “In contrast, the animated sequences are accompanied by music, giving a sense of movement, emotion, and release … allowing her inner world to breathe and expand through sound.”

At times, these two worlds begin to overlap. A moment where Shela looks out from behind white, translucent curtains — echoing the same color and texture as her animated form — suggesting, as Allado notes, “that even within the confines of her everyday environment, her thoughts, emotions, and sense of freedom are always present … that her inner world is not separate from her reality, it flows through it, shaping how she experiences life and perceives possibility,” that the boundary between inner and outer life is not fixed, but has always been porous.

Rather than resolving that tension, When Birds Can’t Fly stays with it — holding both struggle and strength together — tracing how freedom can take shape even within constraint, and how it is often felt before it is fully seen.

For Allado, filmmaking becomes a way of rendering that inner life visible, of giving form to what might otherwise remain unspoken, of locating the meeting place between limitation and imagination, and of allowing even the smallest of gestures — like the flutter of wings — carry the weight of becoming. (Bea Gatmaytan / MindaNews)