Film as advocacy (or truth-telling, the Lamangan/Ilagan way)
I first knew Joel Lamangan as a director and actor with PETA in the early ’80s, when this venerable drama company romped across the ruins of Intramuros, regaling us, stirring us up — through the long night of martial law — with critically acclaimed Third World theater. Boni Ilagan had come upon the scene much earlier, in the ’70s, as an FQS veteran and founding director of the Kabataang Makabayan’s theater arm, Panday Sining, the template for the student activists’ street theater in the urban areas and perhaps even the guerrilla theater in the countryside.
Martial law did not dampen the revolutionary zeal of these theater artists —both incidentally having been heavily tortured by the dictator’s military minions — an attitude, rather a worldview and philosophy of society, that they have now brought into the world of filmmaking. They have become advocates of truth-telling through the medium of film. During the past three years, the Lamangan-Ilagan partnership — with the support of a courageous, risk-taking outfit of unquestionably idealistic novato producers — has come up with a trilogy of films that span a history of roughly half a century. Dukot (Desaparecidos) came out in 2009, followed by Sigwa (Rage) in 2010, and Deadline (The Reign of Impunity) early this year.
Dukot, rated Grade A by the Philippine Cinema Evaluation Board, may soon hold the record for the most traveled Filipino film of all time, having been shown in several major cities around the world. It is a harrowing depiction of enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings attributed to military agencies and security forces who have traditionally looked at student activists, community organizers, militant labor and peasant leaders, and even social workers and Church people, as “enemies of the state.”
Junix Etrata and Maricel Salvacruz — student activists who are abducted, heavily tortured and executed by a military intelligence unit — represent actual people who have suffered the most blatant human rights violations, particularly during the Marcos and Arroyo regimes. There was no let-up, however, of HRVs in the intervening administrations, so that Dukot can be seen as an indictment of this entrenched institutional violence in Philippine society. One cannot watch Dukot without being reminded of Jonas Burgos, James Balao, Sherlyn Cadapan, Karen Empeño, and thousands of others who disappeared — or “were disappeared”, in the new grammar of state terrorism — because they fought for changes in the status quo. Among these thousands was Boni Ilagan’s own activist sister, Rizalina, whose unmarked grave is known only to the military unit which arrested her.
The story of Sigwa actually comes first in the actual chronology of events, backgrounded by the rise of student activism during the first Marcos administration, culminating with the First Quarter Storm of 1970, and chronicles the different roads taken by a group of activists from that period, as they reunite many years later under basically unchanged social conditions. It draws from present-day realities: many have kept the faith in their own ways, some have continued on the path — none more painstaking than this — of struggle, while a few have turned against the old cause and become functionaries of the system they once wanted to transform.
Deadline, billed as “a film on media killings,” is of the most palpable topicality and relevance at the moment. November 23 last week marked the second anniversary of the most heinous politically motivated killing in Philippine history, the Maguindanao (or Ampatauan) Massacre in Mindanao, in which 58 people were brutally tortured before being murdered, some reportedly buried while still alive. Deadline is aptly subtitled “The Reign of Impunity,” referring to the catchphrase which became current, denoting the unbelievable brazenness of the slaughter perpetrated by a warlord clan boasting of connections with the highest official of the land, thus untouchability.
The commemoration of the outrage came at a time when a former president of the country, said to be indirectly complicit in the massacre for having coddled, armed, funded and supported the warlord and his family who reportedly masterminded the mass killing, was facing arrest and imprisonment for her role in grave election irregularities in the same region where the warlord reigned. Among the casualties of the insane, orgiastic mass murder were 32 print and broadcast journalists covering that area of Mindanao.
Deadline is not specifically about the Maguindanao Massacre, but it faithfully reconstructs the political culture — the complex web of kinship, partisan alliances and feudal patronage — that made it possible for a lofty head of state to have a working relationship with the vilest of local warlords in a fiefdom with an uncanny resemblance to Maguindanao. Instead of a phalanx of armed bodyguards and government policemen in the hire of the warlord, and a backhoe burying the dead and undead victims in a mass grave, the film take-off has a planted bomb decimating the ranks of journalists in a press conference held to denounce the election fraud committed by the warlord and his underlings in favor of his political benefactors.
This formidable, fearless tandem of director and writer probably deserves a plaque on which is inscribed:
Sa pagsisiwalat sa kanser ng lipunan, si Joel ay hindi malalamangan. Ang bawat banat ni Boni sa tiwaling sistema ay hindi maiilagan.
