Here and Elsewhere: Reflections on a Philippine Regional Cinema in Flux (2)
This essay is part of Jay Rosas’s Arts Equator fellowship. A version of this essay has been published at eksenrika.com
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On the image of the Bangsamoro (the Muslim Mindanao region), Mangansakan surfaces the erroneous representation of the Moro in cinema, in which the image-construction apparatus of a centralized, studio system, habituated the othering of a people and its culture, dislodging their agency and further disenfranchising them.(13)
One of the films he mentioned is the late Marilou Diaz Abaya’s Bagong Buwan (New Moon, 2003), which I first saw when I was 15. It was an MMFF entry that year.
I rewatched it recently and I realized I was as pitifully innocent as the kid character Francis when I first saw it. Thrown into the middle of warfare, my socio-political consciousness was shapeless, or rather informed by prevailing norms and prejudices.
The film has lofty ambitions. It was made the year after then-Philippine president Joseph Estrada, a celebrated golden-era actor, declared an all-out war in Mindanao, particularly against the separatist group Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), who seeks for a more autonomous Bangsamoro region. While not a direct critique, the film as a response to the state’s war policy was mentioned in a scene by one of the supporting characters, a Christian NGO worker, while mimicking a TV report.
The Manila-province binary is evident in the way the film’s characters perceive notions of safety and conflict, particularly that of the doctor Ahmad, the film’s main protagonist, whose son’s death prompted his return to Mindanao. Manila, the city, is seen as a safe haven in contrast to the conflict-ridden Mindanao.
The perception and belief that a place as far away as Manila can be a refuge, might be an effect of Ahmad’s displacement and assimilation into the urban milieu, with its attendant conveniences, to pursue his profession, thereby uprooting him from the struggle, a fight and cause fought unceasingly by his brother, who remained with the separatist group.
The screenplay surfaces interfaith solidarity with its attempt to place Christians and Muslims together in the site of contestation, intimating a future of harmonious co-existence. (In fact, there are so-called ‘peace zones’ that highlight tri-people relations, as also seen in the short documentary Panicupan (2015) by Bagane Fiola and Keith Bacongco.)
In the film, Ahmad’s ailing mother speaks briefly of land dispute in a mythical tale she must have narrated many times in the course of a life fleeing conflict. And the Moro’s fight for freedom can be easily waylaid in the simplification of the struggle as a religious one. “You’re envious of Christians because they can achieve peace without armed struggle,” Ahmad screams at his brother.
The historical complexity and contextual heft needed to tackle the subject matter, of the Moros’ right to self-determination, can just as easily be conflated into melodrama and the spectacle of war, where choices can be either/or, and one must be declared a victor.
Yet, with its flaws, I trace Bagong Buwan as an entry point into my education and understanding of what it is living in Mindanao, and the relevance of the nexus of storytelling and image-making in the building of our history in pop culture and collective consciousness.
It is, after all, the first film about Mindanao that I saw, even when I did not relate to it before, or that it would make me later realize that I am part of the complex settler history of the south that resulted in such a displacement.
10
In 2008, aside from Gohetia’s The Thank You Girls, I saw films by Davao-born filmmakers in special screening events: Arnel Mardoquio’s Hunghong sa Yuta (Earth’s Whisper) and Sherad Anthony Sanchez’s Imburnal (Sewer).
The effect of these watches were like blips in the monotone of mainstream viewing. But it was a counter-current that will incrementally build to the exciting thrum of a new wave of alternative cinema that was on the rise.
And it is within reach, a filmmaking happening in my own environs. But it was something that I, nourished by an isolated, bootleg cinephilia of pirated DVDs of foreign films, was yet to understand.
The first time I saw a film at our local Cinematheque was in 2013 when I saw films from Binisaya, a film movement and collective that originated from Cebu. It was a program of Cebuano short films and a feature film called Kordero sa Dios (2012) by Keith Deligero.
The films wore the Bisaya language proudly, with a grit that matches the pop-punk vibe of DIY films. I came out of the screenings like a renewed Bisaya, the language suddenly sounded cool and legit, as if arisen from the ashes of ridicule and inferiority portrayed in mainstream films like Jose Javier Reyes’ Sakal, Sakali, Saklolo (2006),(14) where a nanny is chastised for teaching Bisaya to a kid.
It was also in 2013 that I wrote a profile of Davao-based filmmaker Bagane Fiola for a now-defunct local arts-and-lifestyle magazine, which also doubled as a behind-the-scenes look of his first full-length film Sonata Maria (2014). It marked the first time that, tangentially, I became a part of the local filmmaking scene.
And probably—maybe not instantly—I realized that that experience became the impetus for more writing, when just as easily I could have been swayed into filmmaking instead early on.
It was not because of a necessity—I had the impression that nobody was writing about local film in Davao or Mindanao—much more highlighting the budding local film scene that time. It was more that I did not see myself behind the camera. The act of directing was daunting to me. Neither was there a necessity for Fiola and other budding filmmakers to instantly create or make sense of the distinction of a regional cinema.
Fiola, like many of his contemporaries was brought together with the production of Sanchez’s first film Huling Balyan ng Buhi (The Last Priestess of Buhi) or the Woven Stories of the Other (2006), about an ailing babaylan, a metaphor for a waning culture and a reflection on the protracted wars in Mindanao.
Sanchez’s film is considered to be the first Mindanao full-length film, more specifically in the digital era, with no proper accounting of an early Mindanao cinema or film production activities similar to Cebu in the 60s.(15)
There is a photograph that is included in the Mindanao Film Archive display at the Cinematheque Davao before it was removed during the pandemic which shows Sanchez and the film’s crew amid a patch of foliage.
This coming-together is considered pivotal by Dax Cañedo, the film’s cinematographer, and who would pioneer the Mindanao Film Festival, the longest running regional film festival in the Philippines. It “brought together many film workers and talents in Mindanao to a feature film production that would, for the first time, compete in a national film festival,” he said of the film.
With digital technology purportedly liberating filmmaking, the regions birthed filmmakers who took on this wave—a movement in its infancy in the late 2000s. And perhaps this is the apt description of a cinema that emerged in the peripheries. It was more of a nudge, a ‘hey-were-here’ pronouncement, rather than a plea for legitimacy from the main flanks, nor a consciously planned inception of an industry away from the center.
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The attempt to define regional cinema by the locus of filmmaking reaches a kind of dissolution.(16) With varying filmmaking practices and outputs in the regions, attempts to set parameters of distinction through curatorial strategies is at best a making-sense of an unfolding phenomenon.
Any discussion on regional cinema would be incomplete without mentioning the late film archivist and curator Teddy Co, who is celebrated as a pioneer of Cinema Rehiyon, who passed away last year. His essay In Search of a Philippine Regional Cinema, which appeared in the magazine Movement in 1987, is a seminal text exploring the country’s nascent regional cinema.
Highlighting the works of Philippine independent maverick Kidlat Tahimik, whose film practice is in Baguio City in the north, and the Visayan movie industry in Cebu, Co’s article cites alternative filmmaking practices that began redefining Philippine cinema.(17) While there was no mention yet of any concrete filmmaking activity in Mindanao, Co cited the works of Davao-born Briccio Santos, who would later become head of the Film Development Council of the Philippines (2010-2016).
Many regional filmmakers have moved to Manila or other places, but their films are still informed by the realities of their erstwhile home and carry a sensibility unique, or can be easily attributed, to the region or place where they came from.
Like Sanchez, Zamboanga-born Sheron Dayoc, has also moved places and is now based in Manila, and has made films shot in Mindanao, like his award-winning film Women of the Weeping River, about inter-clan conflicts called rido.
His new film called Gospel of the Beast which was shot in Iloilo is the opening film of this year’s Cinema Rehiyon, and markedly different from his Mindanao films. It features local and professional actors who speak Ilonggo. It premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival in October 2023, and the Cinema Rehiyon screening was its first public or festival exhibition in the Philippines.
A Singapore and Philippines co-production, it is what can be called a transregional film, in both national and international context.(18)
The closing film, Ghosts of Kalantiaw (2023), might be another example of this transregionality. Directed by Manila-based Chuck Escasa, it is produced by his wife Aimee, also a filmmaker from Iloilo.
The film is a timely exploration of a controversial pre-Hispanic legal code that curiously traces our current post-truth conundrums to history. The specificity of the film’s subject can be argued as more regional compared to Gospel, whose depiction of violence is more universal and less anchored to place.
12
With the proposition on a “postmodern deterritorialized and pastiche approach”, can we then now look at Bagong Buwan, or the ‘Mindanao’ films of Brillante Mendoza (who is from Pampanga, a province north of Manila), constitutive of a more wide-ranging scope of regional cinema, even when it contradicts the criterion of the site of filmmaking practice?
A mainstream studio can thus make a Mindanao film with a Manila or mainstream filmmaker at the helm. But isn’t this what regional cinema and filmmaking aims to counter, what Edward Saïd might refer to as ‘imaginative geographies’?
Mindanao artist and writer Anna Miguel Cervantes offers a corrective or amelioration to the crisis of contradiction or an impasse in identity: “rather, it is more important to ask: what culture or place of origin does the filmmaker most identify with? What cultures aside from those he/she most identifies with, has the filmmaker profoundly embraced during travels, personal history, or through research?”(19)
It is a question thus of engagement: how does a filmmaker engage with regional cinema? Regional cinema discourse remains to be in the purview of film scholarship and curation, which have mostly been conducted by non-regional professionals, scholars or academics since the term was coined and promoted by NCCA through Cinema Rehiyon.
The participation of regional filmmakers may not be a definitive indicator of their adherence to such a concept. I talked to some new filmmakers during this year’s Cinema Rehiyon, some of them attending the event for the first time. There is a palpable hesitation towards directly embracing the term.
There are positive perceptions—the privileges of representation and exposure—and also a space for interrogating such a label. “I am even unsure if I can call myself a filmmaker (with her first work)”, says Cherry Tattao from Tuguegarao in Central Luzon, much more electing herself as a representative of their regional cinema.
A regional filmmaker—their work, and its supposed regionality—might suddenly find themselves with a preordained consciousness, or burdened with regional distinctions.
13
There is a dearth of criticism, even cursory writing, about Cinema Rehiyon and regional cinema in general, as the project focuses more on exhibition. With its ‘traveling’ nature, and the lack of film writer-critics in regions, the loopy discourse remains within the same circles.
The concentration of film critics and reviewers in Manila would only be able to write about a regional film if such a film is included in a Manila-based film festival, which is still the prevailing practice.
Vicente Groyon’s appraisal of the first Cinema Rehiyon in 2009 pointed out these paradoxes surrounding the regional cinema discourse from its inception. More than a decade later, in a postscript to an online film forum called “Translating Cultures in Regional Cinema” for the 2022 Cinema Rehiyon, Jay Jomar Quintos re-surfaces these paradoxes of our understanding of regional cinema.(20)
The construction of categories—geographies, language, cultural affinities, locus of film practice—seemingly undergoes a self-annihilating process of dissolution. Groyon ends with a challenge to debate on regional cinema’s marginality which “does afford its comforts, securities, and privileges, which the marginalized may not be so willing to relinquish.”(21)
14
Writing in the spaces of the regions also means immersion; it requires understanding the political economy of regional cinema, the imbalance of power and distribution, that should enable structural reforms that will truly decentralize and build a sustainable local film industry.
From production to distribution, Mindanao filmmaker Arnel Mardoquio outlines in an essay policy recommendations towards this direction citing existing regional film communities and local grassroots mechanisms that will support a regional film industry.(22)
There are larger, more important tasks for the writer beyond the interpretive, as much as state film agencies that promote regional cinema should go beyond the celebratory and representational politics. In the development of regional cinema, the writer is not detached as an observer but contributes to the shaping and re-shaping of it.
And the writer-critic, who often also functions as programmer, is inextricably linked with the filmmaker, both occupying the social space needed to foster understanding.
In Ilonggo, the word for understand is intiende. Cagayan de Oro-born Toni Cañete, who attended Cinema Rehiyon for the first time with her first film Desilya, which is about a homecoming, picks up on the word, and offers a renewed comfort in regional cinema’s contradictions:
“Perhaps it is in this mutual understanding that we may reclaim regional cinema as not the “Other Cinema”… but rather the “One Cinema” that fins all of us, binds all of us, and embraces all of us… there is no such thing as too far.”
15
I wonder: how does regional cinema, or discussions on the concept, take shape in other countries? How is a definition of a regional cinema negotiated in the national cinemas of Indonesia, for instance, which is similarly archipelagic, or in India, and other countries where there are different ethnolinguistic groups? What are distinctions and nuances in Japanese cinema made in different regions or prefectures?
Storytellers is a 2013 documentary film by Sakai Ko and Ryusuke Hamaguchi. It has a simple structure; a collection of interviews of people retelling folktales of their region in Tohoku, a region devastated by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011. In a review in Asian Movie Pulse, Panos Kotzathanasis writes: “it essentially addresses a very specific audience that is doubtful if it can be found outside of Japan at all.”(23)
But by way of cultural exchange, Storytellers did find a way to be shown outside a Japanese audience—in General Santos City, during the 2016 edition of the Salamindanaw Asian Film Festival.
Sakai attended the festival and in a forum had this to say (translated from Japanese):
“Listening to this discussion, I realized that I myself really am a regional filmmaker… I did not go to Tohoku in order to create a piece of regional cinema… It was only after I had finished the film that people started calling it a piece of regional cinema. I have this feeling that the film emerged as a piece of regional cinema because of the conversations that surrounded it.”(24)
16
I was determined to let this essay be an exercise in fragmentary writing. Inspired by Brian Dillon’s Affinities, I set out to gather in one text words with affinities to regional cinema, to draw connections from a scattering of points and ideas.
The process—reading, referencing, citing, re-viewing—prompted a kind of ‘dispersal and coalescence’(25) as both personal history and memory collide in an unformed and unstructured chronicle of a period in flux.
If there is a boom and bust with industries and trends, so must waves crest and crash. Are we content just riding in this wave, or are we now just waddling in the ebb of its antinomies?
What about shores that may enable new ways of re-thinking and re-imagination? A gesture towards disconnection and divergence, which leads me to what Filipino-Canadian filmmaker Isiah Medina said that struck me, and in which, I find myself Arts Equator in a juncture for new meanings, and ironically, connections:
“If everything is connected then we are back in the figure of the one, and then change is impossible. Change happens because there is a disconnection that goes uncounted. Cinema as an art-form reasserts itself when we have new negations of cinephilia, and new negations of a sort of journalistic, ‘keeping up with the times’. As soon as you’re keeping up, nothing will be transformed. You’re always late.”(26)
Explication
13. Gutierrez Mangansakan II. Representations of the Bangsa Moro in Philippine Cinema. New Durian Cinema. 2019.
15. In Jay Jomar Quintos’ “Mindanao and Sulu Cinema as Postcolonial Critique”, he cites Mindanao studies scholar Bro. Karl Gaspar’s contention that the educational and advocacy videos of former Columban missionary Neil Frazer in Ozamiz City can be traced as nascent origins of Mindanao cinema.
16. Miguel Rapatan. Regional Cinema 1938-2021. CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art. 2020 (updated 2021)
17. Teddy Co. In Search of a Philippine Regional Cinema. Movement. 1987
18. Regionality in the context of international co-productions is an interesting dimension in regional cinema studies, with films like Carlo Manatad’s Whether The Weather is Fine (2021) and Kenneth Dagatan’s In My Mother’s Skin (2023) recent examples.
19. Anna Miguel Cervantes. Three Cheers, The Godhead of Ritual, Traffic Vol. 2
20. Jay Jomar Quintos. The Paradoxes of Regional Cinema. Mindanews. 2022.
21. Vicente Groyon. Cinema Rehiyon 2009. A Reader in Philippine Film: History and Criticism Essays in Honor of Nicanor G. Tiongson. 2014
22. Arnel Mardoquio. Ang Mga Pampelikulang Komunidad sa Mindanao, Ang Ating Regional Cinema sa Konteksto ng Gawaing Pangkultura. Ang Mahaba’t Kagyat na Buhay ng Indie Sinema. UP Press. 2023
23. Panos Kotzathanasis. Documentary Review: Storytellers (2013) by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Sakai Ko.
24. An excerpt from the transcript of Film Criticism and the Region of Cinema during the 2016 Salamindanaw Asian Film Festival in which I documented, published as part of the Film Criticism Collective by the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.
25. “…I can’t prove it yet – that the venerable genre of the essay has something to do with the future, with a sense of constant dispersal and coalescence.” Brian Dillon. Essayism. Fitzcarraldo Edition. 2017
26. Isiah Medina. Towards a Theory of Film Production, Part 1. Quantity Cinema. 2021.
