“That’s Sari. That’s her vision, that’s her images, her ideas, her language. She’s able to mix these elements so well: history, drama, surreality, and yet it’s real. It’s a documentary and yet it’s fiction. Different realities, different images, and yet she’s able to make them cohesive in the end. It all gels together eventually. That’s Sari.”

National Artist Ricky Lee, Philippine Star

“The conceptual conceit of Sari Dalena’s Cinemartyrs creates a fantastic moment of catharsis at her film’s end that sort of rewards the audience from being able to muster the labyrinthine first half of her film. It’s a personal essay, a narrative historical rumination, and an artist’s statement about the power of film, all rolled into one experimental movie. The film meanders and strays from its plot, building a world that picks up all the elements it juggles into the air and creates a collision that can leave you breathless.”

Wanggo Gallaga, Click the City

“Dalena does many interesting things with her narrative. The main aspect of recreating history through reenactment is intriguing in its realism, especially in terms of production: the relationships among the crew emerge as one of the highlights. The inclusion of archival footage, for example from Memories of a Forgotten War, adds a meta dimension that works especially well in the tribute elements… The mood changes are well-handled: what begins with humorous shenanigans gradually transforms into something far more dire when the crew reach Mindanao, a place wracked by conflict, and when the testimonies of those who fought there are revealed, the horror is genuinely shocking. That the real production encountered obstacles resembling those of Shirin’s crew adds yet another meta layer.”

Panos Kotzathanasis, Asian Movie Pulse

“What Dalena achieves here goes beyond the boundaries of fiction and documentary. Cinemartyrs becomes an act of communion between the living and the dead, between those who remember and those long silenced. In doing so, it subverts the Catholiccentric notion of possession that dominates much of horror cinema. What is often depicted as desecration or demonic becomes, in Dalena’s hands, an act of grace, a surrender to the past that allows the forgotten to move through us. The film does not merely revisit the past but lets it breathe again, to tremble and to speak, through image and sound.”

Joe Balinbin, SINEGANG.PH

“Cinemartyrs is said to be based on writer-director Sari Dalena’s own experience making her first feature length documentary Memories of a Forgotten War, about the Philippine-American War, a war that killed more Filipinos at the hands of American soldiers than in 300 years of Spanish colonial rule. Here, Dalena recreates the challenges faced by female film directors like her from misogynistic colleagues and critics.”

Fred Hawson, ABS-CBN News

“Not only would Cinemartyrs contain footage from her documentary, but also archived footage from films made by Filipina stalwarts like Concha, Consuelo Osorio, and Susana de Guzman. It would not only be about the search for forgotten massacres, but also the search for forgotten women. Not only about the horrors of war, but also ‘the horrors of being a woman filmmaker.’”

Joker Manio, Philippine Star

“Cinemartyrs is a film that demands 100% attention from its viewers and respects them enough to know that they will grasp its several references to the art of filmmaking. It is as if it was written with a target audience in mind: those who are well aware of the wisdom of the “old guards” (e.g., National Artist of the Philippines for Film Kidlat Tahimik and the “duwende”), those who can appreciate the combination of multiple video formats (16mm, 35mm, Video-8, etc.), and those who possess the existing knowledge base (and even unknown ones) from which the narrative pulls, drawing from both national history and Dalena’s lived experience.”

Christa I. Dela Cruz, Esquire

“As the film progresses, one gets increasingly connected with it, until they see and feel in its latter part Dalena’s profound reverence for the Tausug culture, which leads to appreciating her and editor Keith Sicat’s decision to let certain scenes play out in their entirety, particularly the wedding ritual and the glorious and almost hypnotic traditional dance Pangalay, at the end.  The film’s other strength is the cast, who gave justice to their respective roles. But worth singling out is the lead, Nour Hooshmand. Together with her captivating eyes and strikingly beautiful face, her effortless ‘acting no acting’ portrayal of young director Shirin is refreshing. Nour’s facial expressions and the way she delivered her lines were so engaging in their restraint. A lesser actress would have gone astray in attempting to pull off this kind of performance that harmoniously balances nuance, subtlety and naturalness.”

Claude Lucas C. Despabiladeras, Philippine Daily Inquirer