Buhos is an eye-opener

MANILA, Philippines - Buhos is one video its producer won’t mind getting pirated. In fact, Sen. Loren Legarda will smile from ear to ear if the viewer replicates it for all the world to see.

“You can show it anywhere. You can burn it and I won’t call you pirates,” she tells the audience at the presscon. It included not just the media, but local government and school officials.

After all, Buhos is not a film starring today’s young loveteams. Instead, the star of the 30-minute documentary is climate change, with the senator as annotator and Cannes Best Director Brillante Mendoza as the man calling the shots behind the camera.

Mendoza and his cameraman trailed Legarda all over the country — in Marikina, Laguna, Pangasinan, etc. — while she went on medical and feeding missions after Typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng struck.

The color brown is everywhere — on the mud Legarda and her team walk on, the broken houses, the leaves that fell from trees after the storm shook its very roots.

Putik might have been another apt title for the video Legarda produced with money from her own pocket. But the word carries negative connotations. So Buhos, or downpour it is — for the surfeit of rain — and headaches — the twin typhoons gave the country around this time last year.

“Government has no funds,” Loren adds. “This is my gift to the people.”

As everyone knows, the environmentalist in her has sounded the alarm years before Ondoy and Pepeng. Legarda is a United Nations champion for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation for Asia and the Pacific. Her speeches in the Philippine Senate and abroad have called for “climate justice” for developing countries.

Buhos, therefore, is vintage Loren. Unlike her other green projects, like the docu-drama Ulan sa Tag-Araw, the children’s animation movie Ligtas Likas and the United Nations docu Now is the Time, Buhos is climate change 101. It’s back to the basics. Legarda talks about how global warming affects day-to-day life, offers easy-to-grasp scientific explanations of greenhouse gases and climate change. It just doesn’t sit there and does nothing. It gives solutions: Living a simple life, saving on power and water, recycling, waste segregation.

The technique is to let the public know first. Then they will move in the right direction..

The bosses at SM malls agree. The giant shopping center is showing Buhos every third Monday and Tuesday of the month on its big screens. Legarda crows that over 230,000 public school children have seen the video over the past few months.

She’ll be jumping up and down for joy if the numbers jump to the nth power.

“Buhos (which is in Filipino) has English subtitles for our foreign guests to understand,” she relates. “Teachers can use it for their classes. If they cannot burn it, my staff can burn it for them.”

She is grateful to her director, who could have charged astronomical fees, but asked for a “reasonable fee” instead.

They met for breakfast one day and agreed a documentary is the best way to tackle climate change because “it’s more real, with the victims and their plight out there for people to see.”

Legarda, a TV producer for 20 years, with awards under her belt, could have dictated on her director. But she didn’t.

“I consulted my friends at the United Nations and my staff. I previewed it 10 times. But I gave director Brillante a free hand,” she reveals.

Looks like Legarda will again give him a free hand in the sequel to Buhos.

“This,” she points out, “is just an appetizer.” The next one will be more intense to the point of scaring people enough to leave the comfort of their homes and do something, now.

That’s because climate change could easily be our biggest nightmare.

“It robs us of livelihood, makes food scarce, affects our health,” says Loren. “I talked to farmers who said they have turned into fishermen because their rice fields have become part of Laguna de Bay, They don’t know anymore when to plant, when to harvest.”

But Legarda knows what else she can do.

“Trimming Buhos down to 60 seconder infomercials is a good idea,” she muses. Legarda can always tie up with a TV station to air the vignettes.

This would speak well of the station’s image the way Buhos screenings in SM is further boosting the mall’s reputation for social responsibility.

Most of all, it will serve everyone — Mother Earth especially — very well.