Here and Elsewhere: Reflections on a Philippine Regional Cinema in Flux
This essay is part of Jay Rosas’s Arts Equator fellowship. A version of this essay has been published at eksenrika.com.
1
A short film opens with a shot from the point of view of a ship deck. The sea is gray but the sun is rising on the horizon. The waves wobble but not worrisome. In fact, it might be a usual thing to wake up to for seafarers already deep into this unknown, unnamed ocean.
The film is called Layag. After placing us in an unidentifiable territory, it proceeds to detail the morning ritual and work of a Filipino seafarer, whose southern origin is revealed through disembodied conversations of his family in the Bisaya language. This visual diary, assembled by Zarlie Cacho from the intimate recordings of her brother Mark Gil, gains an emotional resonance. Filmed during the pandemic, there is the looming uncertainty of coming home amid heightened restrictions.
The word layag could mean two related things: it is a verb which means to sail—a maritime voyage; it also refers to the canvas attached to the boat which makes it sail. The documentary reminds us of the voyage thousands of Filipino seafarers—the Philippines’ largest labor export to the world—make every year. So huge is this market that around 400,000 have been deployed in 2022 alone(1).
Interestingly, Layag is a fitting film in the morning program of the final day of Cinema Rehiyon, an annual ‘traveling’ film exhibition that showcases around a hundred films, predominantly short films, from all over the Philippines, grouped into the major island-regions of Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, and including recently, films from the National Capital Region or NCR.
This year, the festival under the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) is in its 16th year(2). The screenings happened in a 70-seater mini-theater called Cinema Exmundo (or at the open air grounds outside at night), within the University of the Philippines Iloilo City campus in the Western Visayas region.
The Mindanao short documentaries program also showed Sheila Tomaquin’s Kasubo-Kalipay, an emotional journey similar to Cacho’s Layag, told with the Covid-19 pandemic as the backdrop. Like its title, which means “sorrow-joy”, intimating the intertwining of both emotions, it is a straightforward account of a reunion between a mother and her children in Dubai.
In the documentary, Tomaquin and her brother struggle to obtain the necessary travel documents to travel abroad, with the mother’s financial challenge to get them and the threat of Covid infection, complicating things. All of these happen in the film’s 15-minute runtime. Like Layag, the film’s footage are from smartphone recordings. Tomaquin’s coverage is sufficient enough to assemble it as if it is a plot-driven fictional narrative.
Cacho and Tomaquin are batchmates in a communication undergraduate course from Ramon Magsaysay Memorial College in General Santos, a city in Mindanao where maritime and fishing activities abound. They take the subjectivities of their hometown while reflecting on their own experiences of labor and migration. Their specific geography dissolves into the liminal zones of airports and sea pathways, sites that are an unusual domain of regional films, where rootedness and affinities to a place and its culture is celebrated.
2
The day before, a program of Visayas and Mindanao comedy shorts, including Zamboanga-born Aedrian Araojo’s absurdist bestial tale Animal Lovers (2023), which won last year’s QCinema Shorts competition, and young Davaoeño filmmakers Jermaine Tulbo’s raucous dysfunctional family in Ang Pamilya Maguol (The Mourning Family, 2023), and Franky Arrocena’s life-in-the-streets comedy Ang Maniniyot ni Papa Jisos (Papa Jisos’ Photographer, 2024).
But the one that caught my attention was Ambot Wala Ko Kabalo Unsay Title Ani (2024) by Rey Villaverde from Dipolog, a city in Northwestern Mindanao. His sophomore film is a playful DIY guide to making your first film, which captures the youthful exuberance of his first short Tingog(3) which was in Cinema Rehiyon last year, and which he made when he was in Grade 11. They call their film production group at school Layag Studios.
According to Cinema Rehiyon programmer, the writer and filmmaker Teng Mangansakan, it is worth noting how comedy short submissions from Mindanao were dominant. This statement probably comes off from the expectation that films coming from Mindanao always tackle “serious” subjects like conflict and war.
Nothing comes close to mind when I think of a Mindanao comedy film but Charliebebs Gohetia’s The Thank You Girls (2008), a full-length road-trip film about gay beauty pageant hopefuls who travel the long stretch of the Davao-Bukidnon highway.
3
While in Iloilo for Cinema Rehiyon, it is unavoidable not to think of Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo (2013). A fictional account of his childhood, and a generation of Singaporean children raised by Filipina nannies, around the time of the Asian financial crisis. Ilo Ilo is a strange word—and world—for Chen who hears it from her nanny, detached from his own reality, but one that eventually found its way into a film about migrant laborers.
The film’s story took a dramatic turn when Chen found his real-life nanny, Teresa, whom his family had not seen for 15 years. He brought her as a special guest to the film’s Singapore gala premiere following a publicized search(4).
Recent OFW (Overseas Filipino Workers) films include Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo (2022) and Paris Zarcilla’s Raging Grace (2023), both starring Filipina actresses in the role of caretakers. Nocebo is a co-production from opposite cultural hemispheres that plays the fusion-vs-tension elements interestingly in a folklore-horror revenge narrative.
The story of the OFW, often told in mainstream Filipino films, occupies national relevance, and thus, serves as a unifying narrative of Filipino diaspora and displacement. The narrative of ‘pakikipagsapalaran’ —a Tagalog term that connotes both adventure and risk of a voyage away from one’s homeland—continues to portray these roles of Filipinos taking a jab at fate, reflective of the global capitalist market that exploits cheap labor from “developing” Southeast Asian countries.
4
I once spoke of the possibility of moving to Manila to pursue further studies related to film, to which I was told, with a slight inflection of warning, that I might be ‘uprooted’. Rootedness. The primacy of and affinity to place, its culture, languages, realities, and the various attachments and belongingness attributed to a specific locality.
When I think about rootedness, I think of the kind of cinema cultivated by the film community in Nabunturan, a landlocked town in the province of Davao de Oro. It was founded ten years ago, taking off from an NCCA-supported film workshop and initiated by its founding festival director Atty. Karen Malaki, a Nabunturan native and film enthusiast who happens to be the municipal administrator of the local government at the time.
The organizers wanted to have a feel of a film festival and since there were no theaters in the town, the film workshop outputs were screened al-fresco at the municipal plaza.
Two years later, the Open Air Cinema initiative reached out to them and donated a 20-foot inflatable projector screen. Returning with physical screenings last year after the pandemic, the staple feature of the annual Nabunturan Independent Film Exhibition (NABIFILMEX) still stands, gathering the townsfolk in the annual communal experience, even with the recent construction of their Cinematheque.
Nabifilmex’s example offers an opportunity both as an alternative mode of film spectatorship (not even ‘new’ because it harkens back to a time when malls and commercial cinemas have not usurped the filmgoing experience) and distribution model for independent, non-mainstream films.
But the films that make an impression are those that are made by their homegrown filmmakers—young students, some who started as young as 15, local government staff, and public school teachers—who crafted stories with a distinct commentary on social realities and issues they face.
From the toll of the mining industry to the people(5), the intrusion of modern technology among the youth, and relatable relationship dramas that draw on familial and community experiences, Nabifilmex films collectively present a regional cinema where the distinction of place and its realities resonate the strongest.
5
During the 2017 Salamindanaw Asian Film Festival (based in General Santos City), panelists talked about aesthetics in regional films and arrived at the same problematique in every forum, essay, or post-screening discussion that attempts to theorize the regional new wave in Philippine cinema. There was an inclination to redefine, or find a less amorphous term, to replace regional with peripheral.
But where, or what, is a clearly delineated periphery, if, as Ryan Lim writing for Asian Film Archive, posits that, “cinema is a moving center”… an industry that “booms and busts”, a history that “speaks of avant gardes followed by main flanks(6). A region also has its own center and creates its own peripheries. A perpetual movement of inclusion and exclusion, expanding and limiting.
As an active drawing away from the center, peripheral makes sense. A de-centering, or a decentralization, that also mirrors the governmental act of the Philippines’ regionalization(7), spurred by a presidential decree under the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos—three days after the country was placed under Martial Law—in what could be a consolidation of power through fragmentation in the guise of inclusive development.
Five decades after, the dictator’s son Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is now in power, and this promulgation of a decentralized country has only brought with it violence, poverty, a lingering distrust, and continued division in many fronts. And yet, token regional pride abounds.
Film scholars and writers see regional cinema a bridge, the regions as the “missing parts… to a nation in progress”(8), a response to historical errors of representation reified in cinematic imagery, and more specifically, Mindanao as the “more illuminating place to begin decentering, reorienting, and interrogating Philippine (film) history.”(9)
Mangansakan’s documentary Forbidden Memory (2016) is a recollection of the Malisbong massacre in the Mindanao province of Sultan Kudarat during Martial Law, a topic not widely talked about in Mindanao history. The survivors’ horrific accounts directly counters the claims that there were no atrocities during that time in Mindanao made by then-president Rodrigo Duterte who authorized the burial of the former dictator in the Libingan ng mga Bayani (heroes’ cemetery)(10).
But not only of history—I think of the corrective nature of regional cinema as a re-imagining of cinematic space. Arnel Barbarona’s Tu Pug Imatuy (The Right to Kill, 2017) challenges our postcard view of the Mindanao landscape (or any rural landscape) by laying bare the violence of the state and capitalist development aggression that happens within ancestral lands that led to the displacement and disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples.
On one hand, while Bagane Fiola’s (re)presentation of the forest in Baboy Halas (Wailings in the Forest, 2016) invites foreign exoticization, the film ends with the tension caused by a new or shifting world, in which the same foreign-ness threatens the harmony of indigenous space.
6
The Alternative Cinema Initiatives Conference in 2019, conducted by the Manila-based group Cinema is Incomplete, was the first of its kind to gather stakeholders and personalities of Philippine alternative cinema. Sessions were devoted to discussing experimental and documentary cinema as alternative modes of filmmaking, various initiatives like alternative screenings and distribution, and the emergence of regional cinema.
Emergence. A word that might also have affinity with the term rhizome as metaphor. I first encountered its Deleuzian reference during a keynote talk on archiving by Nick Deocampo, noted film historian, author. filmmaker and archivist. He spoke enthusiastically of the rhizomatic approach to the archive, one that is democratic and sustainable, as opposed to the arboreal or institutional.
Regional. Peripheral. Alternative. Let’s add one more to this word-fray: archipelagic. A convenient, and I think, unproblematic term, alluding more to the Philippines’ topography, but also signifying multiplicity, a scattering of islands, but also of the oneness by the sea that surrounds these islands, whose individual topographies also vary as much as the cultures and lives contained in them.
In his voluminous compendium of Philippine alternative cinema, Deocampo interchangeably uses the term regional with archipelagic (archipelagic cinema “redefining” and “reshaping” Philippine cinema) owing to this emergence of a multiplicity of “representations of the nation that show differences rather than homogeneity”.(7) But these differences also unify the regional filmmakers with similar struggles against limitations brought about by its perceived marginality, rallying for a portion of competitive state agency support.
7
Again, while in Iloilo – and thinking about Cacho’s Layag – I thought about Deocampo’s documentary Private Wars (1997), in which he returns to his hometown in Iloilo in search for his father who left them for unclear reasons. The film begins with Nick on the deck of the ship ruminating on the past and memories of a place.
But his personal inquiry is also an examination of the history and legacy of war in the Philippines, particularly during the Japanese occupation, that left a dent in the Filipino psyche.
Our contemporary history is one of movements and migration. And in an archipelagic nation, the sea connects as much as it divides. Filmmakers, too, have moved places, or are moving in and out of regional borders. And with these movements, regional cinema has chronicled departures and homecomings.
The region as defined by the territoriality of place is becoming increasingly liminal in films, as depicted most recently in 2023 Cinemalaya films Huling Palabas (English title: Fin) by Ryan Machado and Gitling (Hyphen) by Jopy Arnaldo(12).
In Sherbien Dacalanio’s Ang Pagbabalik ng Bituin (2012), a domestic help working in Manila travels back and forth to her hometown in Cabadbaran, Agusan del Norte in Mindanao via the RORO (roll-on-roll-off) transport system bringing with her pirated DVDs and establishing a mini-movie house with her neighbors as patrons.
As much as it is about the titular Estrella’s (Spanish for star) “business venture” which opens discussions on film piracy, access and distribution, this fascinating documentary also presents an example of liminality brought about by labor precarity and increased mobility.
Mindanao documentaries have the narrative tradition of reconnecting with one’s identity and home, interrogating personal and national histories, as in Adjani Arumpac’s War is A Tender Thing (2013), which looks at the Mindanao conflict through the lens of her parents’ separation. There is also Nawruz Paguidopon’s God BLISS Our Home (2017), which chronicles his return home to Cagayan de Oro after years of working in Manila.
But reconnecting with this rootedness of a home also poses its own conundrums. Documenting the reunion of an indigenous family in Migkahi si Ame Tey, Uli ki Pad (Father Said, Let Us Return Home, 2014), Nef Luczon inquires: “Yet this very dilemma of which home, to the ancestral houses in Northern Luzon, or in my mother’s homeland in Negros, or in Mindanao where I was born and grew up that represents 99% of my identity?”
8
The depiction of the rural through countryside landscapes and bucolic scenery signified the regional imaginary. Before regional films re-presented the rural, Filipino films, largely produced in Manila, functioned as a homogenizing portrait of the Philippines and its culture. It demarcated the center and periphery, urban and rural, what is modern and backward, dominant and inferior, known and unknown.
One of my formative experiences in going to the cinema was watching Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes’ Shake Rattle and Roll 2 (1990). I was six when my father took me to the cinema for the first time.
The episodic SRR series, which started in 1981, became a staple in Philippine cinema, with its constant presence in the annual Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF). A festival that, although named after the country’s capital region, happens throughout the entire country.
In SRR 2, the final episode Aswang, is an all-time favorite and one that will stay with me even with the many iterations in both SRR and other Filipino horror films. Aswang is the word used to describe malevolent shape-shifting creatures that harm or eat humans. It has classifications or categories within a fascinatingly rich folklore, and one that also has affinities with Southeast Asian folklore narratives.
Rural meant probinsya—the province. The word probinsya is still used as an umbrella term to refer to a place outside Manila. While this continued usage is probably out of convenience, the image of rural-ness is inescapable. While a lot of Filipino horror films (and even in Gallaga’s non-horror films like the classic Oro, Plata, Mata in 1982) were set in the provinces, there was no labeling of a regional cinema.
As a kid growing up, this was how I imagined the regions to be. The place beyond the comforts of modernity, where unknown and dangerous things happen. And even if I grew up and continue to live in a city—in itself its own center in the Philippine south—this image of an ‘other’ Philippines pervaded through cinematic imagery.
Explication
1. Statistics from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA).
2. Specifically, Cinema Rehiyon is a flagship project under NCCA’s Cinema Committee, but is held in conjunction with the Philippine’s Arts Month in February.
3. I wrote about Tingog and other short films featured in this program at this year’s edition of Cinema Rehiyon here
4. “Ilo Ilo”
5. In this video essay, I talk about four films that revolve on the provinces’ mining communities:
6. Ryan Lim. Missing Objects, or Feeling of Companions in Unfree Terrain. Asian Film Archive. 2023.
7. The regionalization of the Philippines was initiated under Presidential Decree No. 1, or the Integrated Reorganization Plan of Ferdinand Marcos, on September 24, 1972.
8. Tito Valiente. Notes on Criticism in the Spaces of the Region and Other Peripheries. New Durian Cinema. 2019
9. Patrick F. Campos. Topos, Historia, Islas: Film Islands and Regional Cinemas. JCMS 60, no. 3 (Spring 2021): 163–168.
10. Manuel Mogato and Karen Lema. Philippine dictator Marcos buried at heroes’ cemetery amid protests
11. Nick Deocampo. Archipelagic Cinema Redefines National Cinema (2000s-2020). Alternative Cinema: The Unchronicled History of Alternative Cinema in the Philippines. 2022
12. Founded in 2005, the annual Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival has also become a platform for regional filmmakers to gain national prominence. Mindanao filmmakers like Teng Mangansakan and Sheron Dayoc have debuted their first feature films here.
