SILENCED NIGHTS directed by Lawrence Fajardo is Set in a slum in Manila’s infamous Tondo district, SILENCED NIGHTS follows an ordinary laborer whose life is transformed when he becomes the lone witness to the extrajudicial killing of a teenage boy by police officers. As fear spreads through his community and silence becomes a means of survival, the laborer is forced to confront the devastating personal cost of choosing between self-preservation and justice.
Lawrence ‘Law’ Fajardo is a film and television director, producer, editor and writer. Born in Bacolod City, Fajardo studied Film and Theatre at the University of St. La Salle and trained under renowned Filipino directors, gaining a foundation in media production and theater-informed storytelling. He rose to prominence with his short film Kultado (2005) and debut feature Raket ni Nanay (2006), achieving awards for sound, editing, and direction. Known for exploring social struggles, corruption, and resilience, his acclaimed works include Amok (2011), Posas (2012), and Imbisibol (2015), which have screened at international festivals across Busan, Tokyo, Toronto, and Edinburgh. In recent years, he directed The Hearing (2024), Kabit (2024), and Roja (2025), continuing to address societal themes. Beyond filmmaking, Fajardo mentors emerging talent through workshops like the Palawan Protégé Project, contributing significantly to Philippine independent cinema.
Farjardo’s films are celebrated for their energetic storytelling and gripping action sequences, combined with a profound focus on the everyday hardships of Filipino life. His narratives often spotlight workers and marginalized communities, highlighting perseverance, hope, and personal growth amid adversity. Many of his works also explore the human psyche, delving into fears of the known and the unknown, which add depth beyond the surface-level action.
The combination of visceral action, social consciousness, and psychological nuance makes Farjardo’s work compelling to both mainstream audiences and critics. He delivers entertainment without sacrificing authenticity, and his films remind viewers that heroism can be found in ordinary people, and that the most gripping battles are often the ones fought quietly — in homes, workplaces, and the mind. I had the opportunity of interviewing Lawrence Fajardo on making of the SILENCED NIGHTS:
Bijan Tehrani: Silenced Nights begins with a very simple but terrifying situation: an ordinary man sees something he was never supposed to see. What interested you most—the killing itself, or what happens inside a human being after becoming a witness?
Lawrence Fajardo: What attracts me most is the psychological effect of the person or the witness, the aftermath of what he sees after the act of violence. Though the act of violence will last a moment, living with what you’ve seen means living in that moment continuously. What excites me is seeing that person feel like living inside a pressure cooker, slowly heating up… boiling… smoking…ready to explode.
Lawrence Fajardo: What attracts me most is the psychological effect of the person or the witness, the aftermath of what he sees after the act of violence. Though the act of violence will last a moment, living with what you’ve seen means living in that moment continuously. What excites me is seeing that person feel like living inside a pressure cooker, slowly heating up… boiling… smoking…ready to explode.
BT: Your central character is not a politician, journalist, activist, or traditional hero. He is an ordinary laborer. Why was it important that the moral burden of the film fall on someone who has very little social or political power?
LF: Andoy is a typical Filipino laborer, a family man, he loves his daughter, wife and family members, he is a handyman who is known to solve technical problems, he is resilient, he is a survivor with what life has given to him, we somehow would like to impart that the ordinary can also be very important.
LF: Andoy is a typical Filipino laborer, a family man, he loves his daughter, wife and family members, he is a handyman who is known to solve technical problems, he is resilient, he is a survivor with what life has given to him, we somehow would like to impart that the ordinary can also be very important.
Through Andoy, we want to remind the audience that every human being has the right to live, to be heard, to have dignity, and to have the opportunity to build a better life. Equality should not depend on wealth, education, social status or power.
His story is about the value of an ordinary life. Sometimes, the person society barely notices is the person who matters the most.
BT: This concern with powerless individuals facing institutions appears repeatedly in your work. Posas dealt with police corruption, while The Hearing examined a child confronting a justice system that literally and metaphorically fails to hear him. Do you see Silenced Nights as part of the same continuing examination of power and the people who become invisible beneath it?
LF: The films that I made always tackle the emotion and reaction of an individual who confronts the system that they are in. My examination along with the characters is also my questions being part of that system, what interests me is the reaction of these characters in the circumstances that they are force to deal with.
LF: The films that I made always tackle the emotion and reaction of an individual who confronts the system that they are in. My examination along with the characters is also my questions being part of that system, what interests me is the reaction of these characters in the circumstances that they are force to deal with.
My film Posas (2012) confronts the mechanics of corruption, In The Hearing was about structural deafness and in Silenced Nights the threat of the system that will force the witness into self censorship. I think it fits the category… It is my interrogation of how vulnerable individuals can navigate in a system. By placing ordinary characters in extraordinary pressure cookers. A mirror reflecting my own fear and survival when trapped within the system.
BT: You chose an immersive cinéma vérité approach for Silenced Nights. Why did you feel that a more polished or conventionally dramatic visual style would have been wrong for this particular story?
LF: When I went to the place for scouting and planned the shots that would happen, I felt the need to tell the story as vividly as what I saw the first time I was there, so the conventional way to tell it is… compose a shot that would be dramatically beautiful, designed, planned etc. with Silenced Nights, I’m just following what the actor (Andoy) thinks, sees, and doesn’t want to see.
LF: When I went to the place for scouting and planned the shots that would happen, I felt the need to tell the story as vividly as what I saw the first time I was there, so the conventional way to tell it is… compose a shot that would be dramatically beautiful, designed, planned etc. with Silenced Nights, I’m just following what the actor (Andoy) thinks, sees, and doesn’t want to see.
I think when (sometimes) it is heavily styled, it reminds the audience that they are watching a constructed film, calculated and feels heavily directed. I wanted to approach with something observational, presently urgent. Abandoning the conventional, so that we can see the characters’ hesitations, glances, choices, impulses, emotional gravity of the moment, the audience sharing space with the character and forcing the audience to look directly to Andoy, (Nico Antonio), The Mother (Lotlot Deleon), and The Media (Ina Feleo).
Here is our conversation with Troy Espiritu, SILENCED NIGHTS’ Screenwriter:
BT: Silenced Nights begins with a very simple but terrifying situation: an ordinary man sees something he was never supposed to see. What interested you most—the killing itself, or what happens inside a human being after becoming a witness?
Troy Espiritu: When I was writing this film, what I kept returning to was not the crime, but the psyche of a man who happens to see it. What comes after it can take the rest of a person’s life. Because a witness is not in a neutral position or apolitical. The moment you see a crime, you are already implicated and you are obligated to say or not say a word about the matter.
Troy Espiritu: When I was writing this film, what I kept returning to was not the crime, but the psyche of a man who happens to see it. What comes after it can take the rest of a person’s life. Because a witness is not in a neutral position or apolitical. The moment you see a crime, you are already implicated and you are obligated to say or not say a word about the matter.
And that’s the microcosm of the entire Philippine society at the height of this so-called “war on drugs.” We have become witnesses to the bloodbath, and we were all given the same 3 choices: either we speak up and be silenced, we nod our heads and become an indirect accomplice, or we can close our eyes and pray the war does not knock at our own doorsteps.
Most people took the second and the third, and I don’t think that makes them monsters. At that time, that’s the most logical choice for anyone’s safety. I think that is what fear does to ordinary people, more so, fear as a result of a state-sponsored genocide. And this is what I wanted to write about.
BT: The film is inspired by the 2017 killing of Kian delos Santos during the Philippine government’s war on drugs. At what point did you and screenwriter Troy Espiritu decide that this real event should become the starting point for a fictional film rather than a documentary or a direct reconstruction of the case?
TE: By the time I was writing this film, the Kian delos Santos case was finished. The three officers were convicted, and the Supreme Court affirmed it last year. Let’s be fair, justice was done in a narrow sense.
TE: By the time I was writing this film, the Kian delos Santos case was finished. The three officers were convicted, and the Supreme Court affirmed it last year. Let’s be fair, justice was done in a narrow sense.
But that’s the problem with a reconstructed documentary. It ends with the verdict. And for me, that ending is a LIE, because the Kian Delos Santos case is just one among thousands of unresolved cases in Duterte’s war on drugs. Besides, justice is not where the country went.
Rodrigo Duterte left office in 2022 as one of the most popular presidents we ever had. His daughter was elected Vice President by the widest margin in our history. Whatever the court decided about the 3 policemen who killed Kian Delos Santos, there was a second verdict that all of us, Filipinos, delivered it.
That gap is this film. You cannot shoot it as a reconstruction because it did not happen in a courtroom or in the streets. It happened quietly, inside ordinary people over several years. And I hope this film serves as our mirror, regardless how grim the reflection it could be.
BT: When a filmmaker works with an event in which a real teenager lost his life, there is an enormous ethical responsibility involved. How did you make sure that the film did not exploit Kian delos Santos’s death while still conveying the brutality and political significance of what happened?
TE: The boy in our film is named Kerwin Sumilang, and he’s a fictional character. He is assembled from three real teenagers. Kian delos Santos, 17 years old. Carl Angelo Arnaiz, 19 years old, a student at University of the Philippines. Reynaldo de Guzman, 14 years old, who everyone called Kulot or “curly hair.” Kian was killed on the 16th of August 2017. Carl and Kulot went out for a snack on August 18 and did not come home. That is one week.
TE: The boy in our film is named Kerwin Sumilang, and he’s a fictional character. He is assembled from three real teenagers. Kian delos Santos, 17 years old. Carl Angelo Arnaiz, 19 years old, a student at University of the Philippines. Reynaldo de Guzman, 14 years old, who everyone called Kulot or “curly hair.” Kian was killed on the 16th of August 2017. Carl and Kulot went out for a snack on August 18 and did not come home. That is one week.
We chose those three cases, and not because they were the most dramatic. We chose them because they are on the public record. Every detail we drew from exists in a court decision.
There’s something about these 3 teenagers that people should know. That they are among thousands of victims of this alleged “quota system” as part of Duterte’s war on drugs. The number of cases that produced a murder conviction against police is very small. So when I built Kerwin out of these boys, I was not building him from the worst cases. I was building him from the only ones that reached a verdict and the clearest details out in the public.
BT: What fascinates me about the film’s premise is that silence has two completely different meanings. Silence can make someone complicit, but silence can also be the only way a poor or powerless person can stay alive. How do you personally see that contradiction?
TE: From my vantage point, silence is a mechanism that institutions use against its people and it works. A state that kills does not need you to agree with it. It only needs you to be quiet. And the cheapest way to buy silence is fear, because fear costs the government nothing. A man stays silent because of his child, his job, and his life. If he speaks, he loses all three. At this point, silence is not cowardice. That’s just logical arithmetic.
TE: From my vantage point, silence is a mechanism that institutions use against its people and it works. A state that kills does not need you to agree with it. It only needs you to be quiet. And the cheapest way to buy silence is fear, because fear costs the government nothing. A man stays silent because of his child, his job, and his life. If he speaks, he loses all three. At this point, silence is not cowardice. That’s just logical arithmetic.
A man with nothing who keeps quiet to keep his family alive is not the same as a man with something who keeps quiet because it is comfortable. I did not want to write a film that condemns the powerless for being powerless; they pay for the arrangement, and then they get blamed for it as well.
BT: Your central character is not a politician, journalist, activist, or traditional hero. He is an ordinary laborer. Why was it important that the moral burden of the film fall on someone who has very little social or political power?
TE: A journalist or a politician is already a decided character. This would have made the film easier to watch and it’s pointless. These people are professionals in their field, they have a platform and can afford protection to a degree. The audience sit back, relax and go home after the film. That’s it. But I wanted the burden on a man with nothing because that is where the our whole story as a nation actually started.
TE: A journalist or a politician is already a decided character. This would have made the film easier to watch and it’s pointless. These people are professionals in their field, they have a platform and can afford protection to a degree. The audience sit back, relax and go home after the film. That’s it. But I wanted the burden on a man with nothing because that is where the our whole story as a nation actually started.
Think of the myth of Pandora and when she opened the box of evils and miseries out of her curiosity. In 2016, something like that happened to us. Rodrigo Duterte was unlike anything we had since the restoration of our democracy in 1986. He was exciting. He was angry in the way we were angry at the system. And the people who reached for him were not powerful people. They were laborers, drivers, vendors, the ones the system has been fucking for decades, who finally offered something that felt like a reply.
And honestly, I am describing myself. I was once curious too. And I am paying for it. But there’s one more part of Pandora’s myth. When all evils escaped, hope left in the box. That’s not a consolidation. It’s a responsibility to the same people who opened it. And nobody is coming to fix this for us. If the reversal happens, it begins with ordinary people. Writing this film is my small attempt at that reversal. A bare minimum, compared to the damage I caused.
BT: A particularly disturbing aspect of extrajudicial violence is that it does not end with the person who is killed. Fear enters families, neighborhoods, friendships, and even people’s memories. Was that continuing psychological damage more important to you than depicting the physical violence itself?
TE: Death is not about the one who died, but the ones who left behind. In this case, what makes it different is that grief comes with two other things attached to it: fear, which is the whole point of the killings, and shame, when the body arrives from the crime scene with a story written all over, saying he or she deserves it.
TE: Death is not about the one who died, but the ones who left behind. In this case, what makes it different is that grief comes with two other things attached to it: fear, which is the whole point of the killings, and shame, when the body arrives from the crime scene with a story written all over, saying he or she deserves it.
So a mother is not only mourning for the loss of her son. She is arguing on his behalf. She has to prove her case to the people who have already made up their minds. That injury has no ending. A court can convict someone but you can never give the boy’s reputation back, especially when he’s dead.
BT: Do you believe a filmmaker making a film about state violence has an obligation to take a clear political position, or should cinema leave enough ambiguity for audiences—including audiences who disagree with the filmmaker—to reach their own conclusions?
TE: Every film should have a position, whether the filmmaker admits it or not. Choosing who’s character to follow is already a position to begin with. So ours is very clear and I leave it at that.
TE: Every film should have a position, whether the filmmaker admits it or not. Choosing who’s character to follow is already a position to begin with. So ours is very clear and I leave it at that.
As a screenwriter, what I avoid is the sermon. We are not here to moralize. We are here to tell a story, and an audience being peached at stops listening or they nod their heads in sync.
In fact, we also gave space for the other side; if you supported the war on drugs, you will hear your own reasons spoken seriously in this film, without any judgement. Then you can sit and watch what the victims and their families went through because of that policy.
BT: The events that inspired Silenced Nights belong to a very specific period in recent Philippine history, but police violence, fear of authority, and pressure on witnesses exist in many societies. While making the film, were you thinking specifically about the Philippines, or did you also see the story as something more universal?
TE: Both. But not equally. The specifics are entirely the Philippines. The machinery is universal.
TE: Both. But not equally. The specifics are entirely the Philippines. The machinery is universal.
Thailand had a version of this drug war in 2003. Thousands died, but not on our scale. It went on for years, and we don’t even have a single number of casualties. The government claims a few thousand. Human rights groups say otherwise. And the gap is the most frightening in the whole thing. That stain can’t be removed from Philippine history.
But the universal part is not the drug war. It’s the method of fear and violence that makes truth-telling expensive and dangerous. Any country can emulate it.
