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FIRST,
the accolades: Bravos to this Moonrise Film Festival and
the organization behind it, the Center for Environmental
Awareness and Education (CEAE). As their web site puts
it, the CEAE “aims to facilitate environmental learning
through engaging, innovative and interdisciplinary
activities.” Having worked on self-sustainability, the
organization decided to embark beyond ecological
preservation and onto something different and even more
difficult: cultural preservation.
The
result is the Moonrise filmfest, which is also a
competition.
Bravos
and bravos for the filmmakers who confront topics about
the environment. This year, the entries tackle the
problems of global warming and our abuse of the
environment. Bamboo Lake (Kawayang Lupa) explores
the value of bamboo in saving Laguna de Bay. Another
documentary, Lawa ng Bato, talks about a dying
lake. Natural calamities are explored in the
documentaries like Hupa (Nightmare). The nation’s
marine resources provide the theme for Taaw: Buhay at
Karahasan ng Mga Mangingisda sa Anda (Life Stories
and Struggles of Fisherfolks in Anda, Pangasinan), which
chronicles the struggles of the fisherfolk in their move
to protect the marine wealth of their villages. A
documentary from Cebu, Unos sa Ka-ugmaon
(Accelerated Sea Level Rise), explores the common
people’s experience with storm surges and flooding, in
the process examining the relationship between poverty
and the coastal conditions facing the population.
Two
entries are about the endpoints of environmental issues.
The documentary Ugnayan (Relationship)
investigates the manner by which information about
global warming is communicated by the local government.
Hangga’t Meron! (Until There’s One!) brings up
the crisis of awareness regarding global warming and the
degree of involvement by the people about it.
One
entry, Pag-ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa, employs the
metaphor of colonialism, but instead of human invaders,
the piece works around the issue of garbage as invaders.
Moonrise
announces itself as an environmental documentary
filmfest. Here is where my problem lies. Two entries are
not solely about environment, in the sense of the
physical and environmental, and the material. They go
into the more complex issues about culture and
identities. Katutubo at Lupaing Ninuno (The
Indigenous People and their Ancestral Domain) is
described as the story about three indigenous youths
challenging the dominant society on how to “conserve the
almost extinct genus of our contemporary society.” The
other documentary is called Sayaw sa Alon
(Dancing on the Waves), an elegant piece on the Bajau or
Sama Dilaut. The two are exciting sources of the current
debate about the concept of culture.
As an
anthropologist, I find in Sayaw sa Alon a
veritable treasure trove of learning points about
culture or cultures. Can we preserve cultures? Shall we
preserve cultures? For whom shall this preservation be?
Who shall determine what aspects or parts of culture can
be preserved?
Literatures abound regarding this issue. Always, in
these discourses, there is a voice lamenting the death
of a culture, or one sighing as one starts to fade away.
Ah, Sad Tropics, as the eminent French anthropologist
Claude Levi-Strauss sighs. In Sayaw sa Alon, the
documentarist, Nanette Matilac, follows the diaspora of
the Bajau as they are marginalized by the wars in
Mindanao. Some of them find themselves in the streets of
Zamboanga, and then along the railroad tracks of Biñan.
In tracking them, the film asks the question: what
happens to their culture, to their dance.
Who has
the right to ask these questions? From what moral ground
can one ask the Bajau why they have forgotten their
dance when they are caught in the throes of hunger and
physical displacement?
Jean-Jacques Rosseau’s noble savage sadly lives on in
this documentary, which says that the Bajau can only be
true in his native, natural surrounding. The Bajau key
informants say this and the documentary affirms this
stand. The Bajau can only be Bajau if there is a lepa
or boathouse. Remove this setting and the native is not
anymore native.
That is,
of course, a dangerous and highly misplaced position:
cultures evolve and they are never static. In the
postcolonial discourse of James Clifford, culture and
identity are never essential but conjunctural. The
proposition that the Bajau in Manila known for begging
should be asked to return to their “native” land is at
best naïve. If we follow this reasoning, to what origin
shall we, lowland Filipino Christians, return if we are
going to recover our identities?
The
documentary borrows footage from Lamberto Avellana’s
Badjao. In that film, a Bajau infant is thrown into
the sea and its survival depends on ability of the male
adults of the community to save it. The documentary says
the practice has never been done by the Bajau. This
documentary, however, at the end rhapsodizes about the
Bajau as being part of the forces of Nature. This is the
kind of romantic notion that is present in Avellana’s
classic, which the documentary criticizes but embraces
to great length.
As I
said, the documentary raises such questions. For all its
flaws, the documentary remains highly significant. The
dances of the Bajau performed by professional dancers
are significant, too, not because they preserve the
dances of the Bajau but because they are wellspring of
beauty and aesthetics in themselves. The dances
performed by the old women along the railroad tracks are
important because they affirm the reality that cultures
help people cope with anything. All of the dances in
this documentary are as valuable as the dances done
presently on the shores of Sitangkai. One is no more
authentic than the other.
In the
meantime, more bravos should be given to the venue of
the festival: Robinsons Galleria Cinema 3. I do not know
the arrangement the secretariat has with the management
of the retail giant and its cinema but Robinsons must be
fully commended for providing the venue for this
activity that is terribly noncommercial. When I watched
last week, I was the only one in the moviehouse at the
end of the film.
I wish I
could boo the viewing public for not being there. But
let this be a lesson in marketing: we have to sell
Truth.
Next
time let us bring in the audience. |
