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For the first time in the Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences (FAMAS) Awards history, 68 years to be exact, a documentary bagged the coveted Best Picture award.

Alyx Ayn Arumpac's masterpiece Aswang took home the award in an online ceremony held Sunday evening, December 20.

According to the award-giving body, Aswang took home the biggest award of the night for its “painful examination of current realities and a sober reminder that cinema is a powerful social mirror.”

“This is the first time in 68 years that a documentary has received the FAMAS Award for Best Picture,” it noted.

Alyx is a former executive producer of GMA's award-winning documentary show, Front Row. The show first aired on GMA News TV in 2011 then moved to GMA-7 in 2014. It aired its last episode on March 9, 2020.

Other awards that Aswang bagged include International Critics Prize at the 2019 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Amnesty International Human Rights Award at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, and Best Editing at FAMAS 2020.

Aswang is a documentary film that explores the effects of President Rodrigo Duterte's "war on drugs" campaign. Several extra judicial killings have since been recorded, allegedly as a result of the brutal anti-drug policy.

The film follows different individuals whose lives entwine due to violent circumstances during the two years of Manila's "killings."

The two central persons in the harrowing docufilm are Brother Jun Santiago of the Redemptorist Brothers and a young street kid named Jomari.

Brother Jun Santiago documents the killings and helps with the burial fees of those who are left behind, mostly the poor. Meanwhile, Jomari tells the story of the war on drugs from the abandoned youth's perspective. Jomari's parents are both in prison for drug-related charges.

In a review by journalist Neil Young of The Hollywood Reporter, he described Aswang as a “compelling picture of present-day life on Manila's exceedingly mean streets.”

He said, “In a necessarily tough, urgent work studded with startingly extreme visuals, it's the quieter details that really hit home, such as glimpses of kids sleeping among piles of refuse on the roadside.

“Attempting to cover a lot of thematic ground in the course of a conventional running time, Arumpac jumps from subject to subject in a manner that occasionally feels scattershot.

"But each episode, such as an extended sequence involving the discovery of an illegal, cramped custody cell, hidden behind a police station's office cabinet, pulls its weight. Each adds further bloody threats to a desperately disturbing tapestry of structural inequality and endemic, state-sponsored atrocity.”

Watch the trailer of Aswang below: