FOREVER LOVED (Lawas Kan Pinabli, Christopher Gozum, 2011)

Writ large is the heroic struggle of the Filipino diaspora in movies about the overseas contract worker. When the dramatization of marytyrdom is even remotely justified, expect multiple versions out of it: Bagong Bayani and The Flor Contemplacion Story, for instance. Such films tend to perpetuate myths, mostly favorable, about our so-called unsung heroes. This is not, nor should it be, the whole story. Christopher Gozum’s experimental documentary, Forever Loved, forwards a corrective to all the attractive portraits in film or in other media. Or at least, Gozum's point is to paint a more humanized picture.

Few sources can be as reliable and comprehensive as Gozum concerning this. Himself an overseas contract worker of long-standing, he shot three years worth of footage in Saudi Arabia – its deserts, moors, cities and its Filipino expatriate community – without intention to turn it into a film. The material eventually took shape and the result is Forever Loved, a work with a fresh perspective, with a sometimes polemic and often long, discursive content.     

Running 3 hours and 20 minutes, Forever Loved can be regarded as a documentary first, and a fictional/experimental film, second. The documentary footages are real-life interviews with Filipino overseas workers whose stories are both new and familiar. There is the near-rape victim, the unpaid worker, the fall guy, all reinforcing the notion of a tricky, knotty life abroad, but there are also stories from the flipside such as that of the fossil/rock collector, who seems to have found a fulfilling life in his adopted country.  

The most telling segments of Forever Loved, however, lead it to credible authorities with articulate insight into the overseas worker. A Filipino journalist of long-tenure in Saudi Arabia explains how our history of colonial subservience makes us vulnerable to the abuse of foreigners. The creator of patnubay.com, a website that documents the Filipino experience abroad, reports a contrasting quality that is supposed to land the Filipino in trouble: his intrinsic stubbornness, a trait we have never thought exportable. Such contradictory insights hint at the complicated, checkered nature of the Filipino.                

These documentary passages are framed by a fictional story about a newcomer in Saudi Arabia. He has traveled not just to take a job but to search for his wife who has gone missing for three years in that Middle Eastern country. His story takes its shape from the myth of Odyssey as well as the biblical Moses. Like Odysseus, he undertakes a far-ranging journey in the hopes of reaching his wife. Like Odysseus, he even finds a kind of Calypso in the desert. But he is also a kind of Moses, the film’s own analogy, who sadly discovers the debauchery of the exodus, that is, the crimes of the Filipino diaspora.

For every alleged case of victimization that befalls a Filipino, Gozum finds a contradictory voice, a credible statistic, to balance our vision. The facts paint the reverse of the martyr: a not-so-passive, not-so-innocent Filipino. His crimes, largely unreported or distorted when they reach our shores, abound such as drug-trafficking, gambling, and practices deemed illegal in host nations. Those who are in flight, the so-called runaway workers who often want to be repatriated, have a lot to run away for. 

Forever Loved can be viewed, in simplistic terms, as two movies rolled into one. It is possible to untwine the documentary aspect from the fictive section. Each one, alone, could probably hold up to scrutiny. Together, they work in a kind of uneasy synergy that creates an eye-opening and wildly experimental film. That’s because naturalistic documentary does not traditionally mix with formal experiment. Admittedly Forever Loved is more cinematically inclusive – and therefore less disciplined – than the purely experimental Anacbanua.

It may, however, also be a simple question of unfamiliarity. Midway through this sprawling opus, the film’s interweaving of documentary and fiction assumes a rhythm we slide into, and the fresh perspective it affords about the Filipino overseas worker is wholly absorbing even if unflattering. The experience is greatly enhanced by the film's fictional/experimental portion that shares similarities with the avant-garde work of Philippe Garrel. Indelible are the fierce and binding rhythms of Pangasinan language, mostly the poetry of the poet-protagonist, and Ran Kirlian’s futuristic synths on the soundtrack.   

 

Forever Loved, in the end, may well be the most thorough, most textured, and most insightful study on the Filipino OCW. Perhaps such a saga of a people's exodus is bound to unfold in many more unforeseen ways and will never see an immediate end. Gozum deserves to be commended for going against the grain, forwarding a perspective the rest of us aren't prepared to entertain. He never loses sight of the human picture, the stories he has heard or knows first-hand. These stories, whether grounded on the real or the invented, must resonate with him, cut him to the quick, a heart that harbors the traumas of being so far from home.  

                        

(Title in Pangasinan: Lawas Kan Pinabli) 

SAKAY SA HANGIN (Regiben Romana, 2011)

What is simultaneously baffling and beguiling early on in  Regiben Romana’s Sakay Sa Hangin is the fact that it can be approached as a kind of anthropological document as much as it can be understood as a myth of its own making. Multivocal, multivalent, it puts us in touch with the daily rituals, ceremonies and customs of the Talaandig tribe in Bukidnon, Mindanao, while following and observing the preparations of a man who is about to embark on a mythic journey. The journey should be taken on the back of a saduk (a wind-blown vessel), an oracle declares to him, an utterance that engages fact with fictive myth.

The man who must undertake this voyage is Gali, a devout man of peace who, through the whisper of dreams, feels tasked to avert a great war. He seeks the audience of chanters and oracles to prepare the way, enlists his friend’s help, and gathers his family for final instructions. In the interim, we watch him, a great musician, in extended recitals as he plays instruments indigenous to his tribe – the flute, the lute, the jew’s harp. Out of scratch, he creates a talismanic bamboo woodwind: an instrument of power, a kind of weapon in foreign myths, as with Orpheus or Pan. Soon, to consecrate this instrument, he invokes the blessing of the spirits and gods of nature: the earth, the sun, the river, the rain.

On plain paper, this synopsis reads like the outlines of a myth. But in real terms, Romana executes it as a documentary with small touches that elevate it from factual gathering. As described above, the small touches are rooted in the Talaandig’s lore and their quotidian lives. For the musicians like Gali, for instance, it is normal to invoke the higher powers that govern his milieu, his musical instruments made out of the materials of nature.

Animism is a strong presence in the life of Gali and the tribe that he represents. Romana is even inclined to believe its reality transcends the scope of his film and even captured in it. While editing two-months-worth of material taken among the Talaandigs, a startling discovery occurred to him. Figures of heads and faces seemed to appear among the flora in his footages, something that he went on to “emphasize” as triangles in his film. Perhaps there is more to native beliefs than meets the eye.

Waway Saway, who plays Gali, however, claims the brighter spotlight. It is curious where Waway the musician ends, and Gali the character begins. With long, extended takes that document his every move and his every musical note, he commands us as a captive audience. He lulls us like a Pied Piper: when the end comes, the two-hour running time seems scarcely long enough.

That is not, however, to take away from the great achievement of Romana, rather it underscores the film's rich multivalence. Sakay Sa Hangin is a worthy ethnographic document of singular distinction. Few films -- Murnau's Tabu and the works of Flaherty perhaps -- can be compared with it through cinematic history. Sakay Sa Hangin, without didacticism, also retrieves our lost connection and communion with nature. Framed in an open-ended structure, the film demonstrates the flow of life and how it ought to be held sacred: war should not enter into it. And once we latch on to its lyrical imagery, its fabulous structure and spare storytelling, it is a breeze to watch. A breath-taking ride on the wind.

(Title in English: Wind-Blown)

SA KANTO NG ULAP AT LUPA (Mes de Guzman, 2011)

Filmmaker Mes de Guzman seems to have one overriding and obsessive tendency throughout his career: a Wordsworthian affinity for naif and innocent characters caught helplessly in the clutches of an unwelcoming world. These protagonists in de Guzman's films are often children or youths, depicted as castaways or as disenfranchised creatures left to their own devices, scarcely comprehending their sorry plight. Many of the old Kanun films of Iran, films catered to the young, are artificial compared to this, their dilemmas little more than math problems geared to their delicate age, their outcomes leaning towards happy or hopeful resolutions. De Guzman, on the other hand, does not shy away from tragic denouements, taking the classical unities of drama to their logical and truthful ends.

This darkening of vision in the work of de Guzman has been most pronounced in recent years. Last year, he engineered Stone is the Earth and Ice is the Earth, two parts in a projected trilogy that are particularly embedded in this ominous vein. That is not to say that it is a newfangled tendency: his earliest short, Batang Trapo (2002), and his famous Daang Patungong Kalimugtong (2005) are not exactly sunshine paeans to children.

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa is apt to sunder hearts once again. Set in the inhospitable province of Nueva Vizcaya, it takes an unflinching gaze at the hand-to-mouth lives of four street boys living on the fringes. They are from the highlands, but the lure of modern life and disaffection from their families have made them come down to the big, bustling towns like Solano, Aritao and Bayombong. However, few jobs and opportunities beckon, only the pangs of privation. Instead of food, they chew on betel-nut to slake their hunger. 

As in many broods, there is a pecking order among these kids. Yoyong, the eldest, most adolescent of the group, is big-brotherly but not above putting a hand on his younger mates at the slightest provocation. Poklat is a firebrand, who either stands up to Yoyong or abuses his secondary position. Boying seems loyally attached to the group, finding his way back even after being forced home by his father. Uding, the literate among them, is the bottom feeder, who must make do with scraps after every one has had their fill. 

Episodic in structure, neorealist in approach, De Guzman's film shows these kids caught in the last gasp of innocence. Their naivety is best illustrated in a scene where they bring home a discarded vhs player found on a garbage heap. Believing it to be a gift, they have it tested on a neighbor’s television, only to realize that it is broken and  beyond repair. Worse, it is technology as obsolete as their innocent worldview. 

For the most part, cynicism has not corrupted these kids. The world still holds out grand abstractions like camaraderie and love. In one episode for instance, Yoyong is taught how to read and write by Uding, in the hope that through letters he can court a well-off girl he admires from afar.

De Guzman, however, does not underestimate his characters. He affords them with sparks of cunning that seem lifted from childishly clever movies they have seen. One episode details how the youngsters write a letter to trick the boss at the local slaughterhouse into hiring Yoyong. They surprisingly succeed, and are soon helping Yoyong wash pig entrails. At such times, the twists and turns may seem to be scarcely plausible.

But De Guzman is carefully setting things up. He is chiseling away at dramatic uniformity. This is the bliss before the fall. Events are steering inevitably into an incontrovertible ending. What happens, he asks, when a disjuncture between the boys' unwieldy dreams and the world's monolithic reality becomes all too painfully manifest? What happens when their sense of family derived from the group is threatened and the appeasement requires such grand and heroic gestures?  And what happens when hunger intervenes in all these boys' hardships? Antidotes to these visceral yearning lose their dark luster. They must be sought at all costs. 

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa is a film composed with calibrated compassion. It secretly wishes for a reprieve for its characters, but it concedes to the tenor of things. The final moments are oneiric and hallucinatory, swathed in muted light and thick fog: the boys are trudging up a grassy mountain. Does it conjure a kind of ascension, or are they being summoned again for a cruel comeuppance? Are they going back home, or nowhere between heaven and earth?    

             
(Title in English: At The Corner of Heaven and Earth)
(Alternate Name for Director: Ramon Mez de Guzman)

MAPANG-AKIT (John Torres, 2011)

As a child, John Torres was a shy and timid figure. Rather than play and mix with kids his age, he kept himself at a respectful distance. Rather than join and converse with them, he would remain just close enough to read their speaking lips. This way, Torres would listen in, and from the few words and phrases picked up, he would reconstruct conversations and devise his own stories. That's how, Torres reveals, his instinct for narrative got an early start and has been honed ever since. From his first feature film, Todo Todo Teros, onwards, this affinity for spinning tales has served the filmmaker in good stead.  

In his fourth feature to date, "a long short film” that runs at roughly 40 minutes, Torres again regales us with his lip-reading abilities. Mapang-akit puts words in the mouths of villagers in Laruja, Antique, as it were, and delivers a story populated by aswangs and elementals. The result is a hauntingly arresting work, mysterious in its resonances of folklore, and often idyllic in its portrait of the ways of life in a sleepy village.

The story, in the fictive matrix of Torres, is spare, but ingenious. It concerns an unassimilated settler named Anita, an elderly woman from Negros suspected of being an aswang. Her otherworldly beauty, her dispassion in men, and her seemingly uncanny good fortune are all taken against her. The death of a villager named Milo, the suitor of a certain Elena from Negros, a supposed relative of Anita, only serves to fuel the rumors. Though it is simplicity itself, such a story has remained strong for a long, long time, a residue of regionalism once encouraged to serve colonial rule.   

The beguiling beauty of Mapang-akit lies in its almost ethnographic regard for the sleepy village the filmmakers used as location and how it is dreamily shot. Because Torres’s co-cinematographer, Che Villanueva, happened to be shooting in familiar territory – the village of her relatives – the camerawork radiates a presence akin to that of a villager: total and unobtrusive. There are few, if any, self-conscious stares at the camera. In turn, the camera takes in everything and follows around the villagers in their laidback chores and activities: un-husking coconuts, partaking of afternoon popsicles, conversing about the dead.       

A little bit of controversy now hounds Torres after the revelation of his aesthetic style of inventing dialogue, how anthropologically and even legally it may violate the moral rights of his unwitting cast, how his methods might verge on exploitation, more so in the light of his admission that consent of his subjects was not obtained as to how the filmed material would be put to use. It must be said, however, that Mapang-akit is fiction, and although it had its origins in documentary, it is now beyond actuality. Even documentaries, it bears noting, are not immune to artistic latitude: they are, not uncommonly, staged and fictionalized. Nanook never took exception to recreations of bygone practices like seal and walrus fishing. In documentaries like Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), it is well-known how Werner Herzog made up lines for his willing, smiling subjects. Cinema, it bears repeating, is a dream factory, a fiction factory.

***

John Torres writes to clarify an ambiguous portion in my review, regarding where consent of his subjects was obtained, and not obtained: 

"I had their (the villagers) consent to shoot from up close and at a distance for a film that we were making. They weren't made to act so maybe for them and for others, this would mean it's a straight-up documentary based on process.

It ends up another creature, with them speaking different lines. I don't have their consent when I heard things beyond the words they spoke, but I'm excited to go back and show them the film."

My response:  

I have revised the unclarity. When I said "consent of the subjects was never obtained" I did intend to mean how it is worded now: that the villagers were not informed of the fictive treatment the filmed footages would undergo. I was writing from the point of view of someone who might find this problematic. But that is not my own position: I refute the issue subsequently from my own perspective as someone who thinks it is verging on the preposterous to criminalize authorial freedom. It simply goes against the whole idea of art as a whole.     

John is by no means a fly-by-night artist: He has expressed willingness to return to Antique and show his film to the village where he shot Mapang-akit.    

It is intriguing how the village will react to the finished film, but I have a feeling their response will be one of happy amusement. Gone are the days when cameras stole souls.