Screenplays: Mga Ibong Mandaragit

Clarification
There is no screenplay titled "Mga Ibong Mandaragit" from 1888 by Jose Rizal. "Mga Ibong Mandaragit" (Birds of Prey) is a mid-20th-century Filipino novel by Amado V. Hernandez. Rizal’s major works from that era are the novels "Noli Me Tangere" (1887) and "El Filibusterismo" (1891). If you intended a summary of Hernandez’s novel, see below; if you meant a specific work by Rizal, say which one and I can summarize that instead.

Summary
Set in the wreckage of the Philippines after World War II, "Mga Ibong Mandaragit" follows a young guerrilla-turned-activist named Mando who confronts a society rebuilt atop old injustices. The title’s "birds of prey" are the powerful, landlords, wartime collaborators, comprador businessmen, and their political patrons, who swoop in to seize the fruits of liberation and feed on the people’s poverty. Mando’s journey begins with survival and anger, but it evolves into a search for a principled strategy to transform a nation trapped between feudal habits and neo-colonial arrangements.

Hernandez braids Mando’s story with the legacy of Jose Rizal. The novel reimagines the legend of Simoun’s jewels from "El Filibusterismo", long cast into the sea by Padre Florentino with the hope that future generations, morally ready, would reclaim them. In Hernandez’s narrative, that prophecy turns literal and symbolic: Mando recovers a hidden cache associated with that legend and resolves not to use it for personal vengeance or elite intrigue, but to seed a people’s project, press, cooperatives, and schools, that could arm workers and peasants with knowledge and organization.

As Mando and his companions build a newspaper and mutual-aid networks, they expose profiteering, land-grabbing, and the seamless passage of collaborators into postwar office. Their successes bring swift retaliation. Lawsuits, bribes, and thugs descend; newspapers are censored, organizers harassed, and communities terrorized by private armies. Hernandez keeps the struggle human through Mando’s personal conflicts, especially a complicated affection that crosses class lines, testing whether love can bridge social antagonisms or only mask them. Faced with offers to compromise, Mando measures comfort against commitment, aware that every concession risks turning a people’s treasure into the elite’s new tool.

The conflict escalates from courtrooms and editorial pages to raids and arrests. Friends are jailed, a mentor is silenced, and Mando is driven back to the countryside where guerrillas once fought foreign occupiers and now contend with domestic predators. The novel resists melodramatic closure. Rather than deliver a single victory or martyrdom, it leaves a forward-leaning horizon: the movement survives, the press reappears under new names, and the recovered wealth, understood now as the organized strength and political clarity of the masses, circulates in the living institutions they have built.

Context and themes
"Mga Ibong Mandaragit" bridges Rizal’s reformist critique with the mid-century labor and peasant struggles Hernandez knew firsthand. It indicts the continuity of power, how colonial hierarchies mutate but endure, and challenges the reader to weigh reform against revolution, persuasion against force, and personal advancement against collective emancipation. Journalism and education are portrayed as weapons; love and loyalty as trials of principle; wealth as a moral test whose only just use is to return it to the people.

By recovering Rizal’s symbolic treasure and placing it in the service of organizing, the novel claims that the real riches of a nation are not jewels or capital but the conscious, disciplined action of its citizens. The birds of prey may dominate the skies, Hernandez suggests, but they cannot own the future if those on the ground learn to fly together.