Tales of social realism

In this country, we fight so many wars.

Down south, the Mindanao conflict that may never see resolution.

But even in the streets of Manila every day, we fight to get to work and get around the city. We fight as we deal with traffic, with the inadequate transport system and even with the ambulant sampaguita vendors, who litter intersections at night.

The war in Mindanao and our little wars with those sampaguita vendors (they can be tough) are the subjects of two significant indie films being considered in the coming Gawad Urian race (no definite date yet).

Sampaguita is by Francis Xavier Pasion, who almost won the Urian Best Director trophy in 2008 (he snagged the Best Screenplay award though) for his film Jay, a realistic and scary depiction of how television people exploit their subjects to bring in the almighty ratings.

Sampaguita this time exposes the obviously sad lives of those young flower vendors  from those who have to wake up very early in the morning to harvest the buds to those who sell the stringed blooms at night.

The film is like a docu-drama that probes into the personal circumstances of the children forced to work at such early age. These are very young people who were given a raw deal in life. Some of them are unable to come home without making a sale  or at least be able to hit their quota for the day  because their own parents, who should be providing them with a decent life, pounce on them if they are unable to make money. What tragic young lives.

Surely they aren’t better off in the streets, especially at night, where they are exposed to danger of all types. Even they have to fight their own little wars  against hunger, predators and even among themselves. Your heart truly goes out to them.

Sampaguita, however, shows all facets concerning their lives. Some of them have tried living in orphanages, except that there are those who can never live with rules and discipline, which we all need to be able to exist in an orderly society. And so they return to the streets to become vagrants once again.

And yes, we are also shown how pesky some of them could get. Motorists actually have two reasons to beat the red light because they end up having a double whammy when caught in an intersection. One is that you lose a few minutes stalled on the road and then you get accosted by sampaguita vendors who are like a swarm of bees circling your vehicle. While we feel for these poor children, charity isn’t always in your heart when you are in a rush  aside from the fact that you can’t be giving dole-outs in every intersection of this metropolis where those vendors are eternally present.

Sheika is also about how we have to fight wars even in supposedly civilized cities. It is the story of a single parent (played by Fe GingGing Hyde) from Sulu. She is a teacher, who is forced out of her hometown due to the conflict down south. Thinking she and her two teenage sons would have a better life in Davao, they try to strike it out there  only to realize tragically that there is no perfect place on this earth.

Sheika is directed by Arnel Mardoquio and he weaves an engrossing tale about people in Mindanao who had been displaced by the war. How sad it is to see a teacher, who has to give up her noble profession to eke out a living with her children in the streets. And that is all because of the war in Mindanao.

Like Sampaguita (which is now an official entry in the Berlin Film Festival), Sheika could have been paced a bit faster. But both films tell truly socially relevant stories. The themes of the two movies are very disturbing because these are real.

It also helps that the actors in both Sheika and Sampaguita are given proper motivation and guidance by their respective directors and as a result all deliver impressive screen performances.

However, it is Ms. Hyde who may end up in the Urian list of Best Actresses nominees after she effectively exhibits a whole wide range of emotions  happy, loving, content, fearful, feisty and, at one point, psychologically-imbalanced.

She and the previously untried, untested and unknown talents in Sampaguita become the face of the societal ills in the Philippines that need to be addressed seriously by the government  as depicted in the indie films Sheika and Sampaguita.