Princess Urduja
ABSTRACT
The film is about two interweaving stories set in completely different worlds - the real and the fantastical. The protagonists, Princess Urduja and a soldier's wife, both deal with grief in the passing of their own respective companions. With awakening as its central theme, the film does not solely focus on their sorrow. Instead, it strives to shed light on the lead characters' immense ability to rise up out of their situation and their valiant decision to accept their new lives as the new leader of their own dominion.
Princess Urduja is set in one quiet night when Rita – a soldier’s wife – tells her two children the tale of Pangasinan's legendary warrior, Princess Urduja, as she goes on a search to find her missing brother, Haring Mahabala. An unexpected visitor interrupts the storytelling, as he delivers a letter that will forever change Rita's life and the course of the Pangasinan tale.
The film makes use of the Montage and Feminist Film Theory so as to translate and articulate well the idea of feminist awakening and the strong parallelism between Rita and Princess Urduja.
The cinematographic treatment on the other hand is strongly rooted from classic cinema with adaptations from Alfonso Cuaron’s A Little Princess and Ang Lee’s Life of Pi in order to enrich the fantasy-drama tone of the film and the semblance between the real and the fantastical world of the story. ==
Ang, T. M. (2013). Princess Urduja, Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis, University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication.