In “FANEY (The Fan),” the newest film by the quietly audacious Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr., a nation’s grief is refracted through the intimate lens of one elderly woman’s devotion, disappointment, and defiance.
At once an elegy and a generational reckoning, the film draws its power not merely from the shadow of Nora Aunor’s death but from what it ignited in her fans. Or more precisely, in one: Milagros, played with aching dignity by the veteran actress (and director) Laurice Guillen.
The film’s premise is deceptively simple. Nora Aunor, the real-life Superstar of Philippine cinema—whose haunting voice and stoic, luminous presence etched her into the consciousness of generations—has died. For Milagros, this is no mere news item. It is a rupture, a cataclysm. The woman she idolized, and perhaps loved in the only way a fan can—deeply, irrationally, enduringly—is gone.
But this is not just a story about grief. It is a story about being seen, or rather, the need to be seen through the lens of those we love, even from afar.
The fan as a figure is often caricatured—hysterical, obsessive, disposable. In ‘FANEY,’ Alix reclaims her as a vessel of memory, resistance, and quiet rebellion. Milagros may be frail in body, but her spirit still pulses with the undiminished fervor of youth. She wants to go to the public viewing of Nora’s body. She needs to. Her daughter, Babette (Gina Alajar, whose controlled fury and tenderness evoke decades of unspoken history), forbids it. There is too much risk, physically and emotionally.
But the soul does not recover in bed. And so Milagros, with the cunning and desperation only the truly devoted can summon, enlists her granddaughter, Beatrice (played with refreshing naturalism by Althea Ablan), to help her defy her daughter and say goodbye to her idol.
What ensues is not quite a road movie, nor is it a chamber drama. It is, instead, a series of remembered and invented intimacies—a cross-generational dialogue between a Noranian and a modern K-pop fan, between the analog past and the hyper-connected present, between the idolatry of legends and the immediacy of digital fame.
There is an old saying, paraphrased often in fan communities: “We don’t choose our idols. They choose us.” “FANEY” is a meditation on what happens when those idols go, and what remains when the lights dim. It’s a love letter to fans, and to the quiet, persistent power of remembering.
