A Story of Betrayal, and the Pain That Followed Off-Screen
Released in 2024 under the Vivamax brand, Salisihan promotional material highlighted the quiet film intensity of the sophisticated Filipino dramas. Directed by Ian Arondaing, cast members Chester Greccia, Zsara Laxanana, and Amabella De Leon played lead roles and bore the film’s intimate, suffocating vision with the raw vulnerability. All chamber dramas explores the themes of love, betrayal, and the ghost of choices we have tried to bury, and Arondaing’s directorial debut was no exception. Delicately Salisihan was not easy. With the devoid of emotionally invested promotional material, Salisihan was the hardest film to make from the perspective of the emotionally drained cast and crew.
A Marriage at Its Breaking Point
The film begins with Dan (Chester Grecia) and Anna (Zsara Laxamana), a married couple whose life seems stable, yet is, in reality, disintegrating due to unarticulated grief. They’ve been attempting to conceive a child and the pressures of unrelenting infertility quietly pained their marriage. The arrival of a young woman, Sophie (Amabella De Leon), complicates issues further. Sophie is currently pregnant, presents herself in a vulnerable state, and claims to be Dan’s daughter from an old relationship. Sophie’s arrival turns the already fragile home into a pressure cooker of jealousy, guilt, and confusion.
At its core, Salisihan explores emotional displacement. It is about people’s desperate attempts to love while submerged in lament and loss. Each scene carries that positively weighted stillness, the essence of which, is the inability to alter the past. It is a story told through silence, with the most profound betrayals transpiring not during verbal altercations, but through unspoken communication in the form of stolen glances and reluctant touches.
The Emotional Toll on Set
The cost of realism in the film went well beyond psychological boundaries. Most of the actors were relatively new to this kind of deeply psychological work, and, in turn, unprepared for the mental exhaustion that would accompany the work.
Zsara Laxamana (Anna), who plays Anna, commented how some scenes made her emotionally shattered. One has to act as a woman who battles with infertility and betrayal, an issue that remains taboo in most Filipino households. “You’re performing pain that feels too familiar,” she stated in a post-release interview. “Even if you’re not living that exact story, you’re reliving parts of your own heartbreak.”
This kind of emotional preparation needed to engage with women who lived with infertility and understand what shame and silence surround them. Some of these stories resulted in insomnia and break downs during filming. Between the takes, she had to find a way to cope as she had to act without living those emotions.
Chester Grecia had different challenges. His was the challenge of restraint. Dan is not an expressive character; he is weighed down and burdened by guilt, a man who more willingly hides than reveals. Grecia said that staying in that headspace for weeks made him withdrawn off set, too. “You end up carrying your character home. And that’s dangerous when your character is emotionally drowning.”
Shooting Through the Struggles
Just like other Vivamax productions, Salisihan had its own challenges in production. Short schedules, limited resources, and the challenging weather conditions. Salisihan was filmed mostly in small, closely confined interior spaces that added to the story’s oppressive tension. These tight, humid environments made the physical discomfort that shooting in those spaces entailed psychologically more challenging.
To set the right mood for the emotionally charged story, the crew often worked late night shifts to get the lighting just right. Actors, too, were in some scenes during which they had to perform while exhausted and with little sleep before the next call time. Yet, that raw fatigue was precisely the energy that the film needed. Salisihan was imbued with the reality of tired eyes, heavy sighs, and long pauses.
There were also moments of conflict within the team. The director’s insistence on authenticity sometimes clashed with the cast’s emotional limits. Some scenes involving physical closeness or confrontation had to be reshot multiple times because Arondaing wanted every gesture to feel “lived in, not staged.” The actors, though respectful of his vision, often left the set emotionally bruised.
Behind the Boldness
Even the title invited controversy. Salisihan, in its literal translation, means “the act of replacing someone.” The film was bound to be dubbed “just another erotic domestic drama” within the Vivamax universe. Still, Arondaing and his cast wanted to fight for more. They wanted to show betrayal not just in the form of lust, but in the form of fear and emotional distance.
That battle was certainly not easy. There were pressures to add harse contents for viewers, but the director opted for more artistic restraint. This led to creative disagreements with the producers, requiring the team to justify their vision all the way to the final cut. “It was a constant balance between storytelling and survival,” an anonymous crew member related. “We were trying to protect a film that could easily have been misunderstood.”
Amabella De Leon, as Sophie, endured her own storm. As a novice, the opportunity was also risky and rewarding, as she was assigned a morally difficult role – a pregnant woman who disrupts the family. She described receiving hateful comments on social media, with her character’s controversial actions leading audiences to judge her personally. For a young actress, public scrutiny of that nature was a profound challenge.
When Reel and Real Become One
The emotional exhaustion of Salisihan’s production didn’t end with the final shoot. After the film’s release, many involved said it took weeks to emotionally “recover” from their characters. Zsara shared that she found herself crying during interviews, still haunted by Anna’s silence and despair. Grecia, too, admitted he found it hard to return to lighter roles afterward, having internalized Dan’s guilt far more than he expected.
Even the crew spoke of the strange intimacy that formed on set — a shared vulnerability born out of the film’s themes. Long after filming wrapped, they remained in touch, bonded by what they had endured together. “It wasn’t just acting,” said De Leon. “It was like therapy, but the kind that hurts before it heals.”
The Film’s Echo Beyond the Screen
When Salisihan premiered, it didn’t explode at the box office, but it found a quiet, devoted following online. Viewers connected with its emotional rawness, praising its performances and restraint. Many said it felt “too real” — a phrase that both complimented and unsettled the cast.
Salisihan tapped into universal Filipino sentiments: the anxiety of substitution, the unspeakable weight of infertility, and the gradual loss of trust. It reflected the intimate and emotional realities of many families, where love is tested not in great occasions, but in the erosion of the mundane.
More than a small film, Salisihan became a tissue of the creator’s vulnerabilities. The countless struggles during the film’s production only augmented its realism. The exhaustion, the longing, and finally the quiet heartbreak that you see on the screen is not acting. It is a testament to the creative and personal realities the actors and crew alike had to contend with.
Unsurprisingly, it is this weight that makes Salisihan so compelling and so resonant. There is the absence of a great noise and, with it, the knowledge that every silence, every tear, contained a personal history not only for the character, but for the storyteller themselves.
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