THE comments on the critics’ comments have been written. I assume the awards and recognitions have been savored. The questions have been asked and will be asked: Why this film? Why not that film? You can even extend the questions: Why this actor? Why not that actor?

You have heard this statement in the past, when winning filmmakers congratulate everyone and wished that the jury could give everyone the victors’ wreath: I share this award with all the nominees. There is nothing flippant or insincere about that statement. The metaphor for a film contest is not a battlefield but really an intense gathering of minds all keyed up to appreciate the power of an art form that, according to Ingmar Bergman, “goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

The one that gets the nod of jury, it must be said, is not the only film with that penetrating power; the other films discussed during the deliberation, those films that may have caused our heart to beat a little faster, our mouths to go dry, our vocal chords exercised to bring edge and volume to our usually sedate voices—these works have also went directly to our feelings. From those emotional wells followed the intellectualization, the discussion and our peer’s question or doubts why we think the maker of that film should go up the stage.

Canons are easy to read but difficult to accept. For every power in the inclusion, there is the default weakness in the exclusion. Jean Luc-Goddard places cinema between art and life, and thus partakes of the difficulties of realities and how they best could be brought up to light—or darken—the screen. Films are invariably tied to the politics of the land and their makers.

For every well-examined sociology and politics of the winning films, there are the other films left unexamined. For the Gawad Urian, we made sure this would be attended to: The program for the awards night carried two reviews from two different manunuri for each nominated film.

Looking back, I cannot help but ask myself if I should have voted for another film, or another actor. The process—the mind is a lonely, lovely obsessive unfaithful lover, as it is also a frightening political scientist—for selecting is once more reexamined in one’s mind. The process of selection goes on and on and I find that, like Orson Welles, I discover and rediscover other films that were made with the “eye in the head of the poet.” These are films that had the compelling sway of poetry and the majestic prose of an engaging essay.

When a film is chosen over the other, I struggle with those whose directors and actors were left to applaud the winner. There is nothing wrong with this, because nominations come after some 50 films had been viewed, examined, mulled over. The short list, by itself, is really a compendium of winners, a selection of excellence. The nominated films and the categories in them are the kinds that made critics think and rethink their aesthetics and ideologies.

Take Halaw, for example. The regular discourse for it in tabloids and newspapers is that it was shut out from the competition. The description is not apt. The film by Sheron Dayoc remains and will remain an important commentary on Filipino diaspora. In the film, the notion of political boundaries becomes moot to the ordinary citizens who see the expanse of the seas as an element of journey. It is to the credit of Dayoc that the eye in his head pushed him not to dramatize the scenes. The heroics are tempered making it even poignant for the victims of migration who are preyed upon by regular guys and not by systems.

There is, of course, a structure that allows this abuse, an economics that enable countries to ignore the events at the social and geographic backdoor. In the end, the shots are fired in the darkness and some are killed with their dreams, while the national/central government is not informed because they could not care less. The film Halaw reminds us that all this appellation regarding migrant workers as Bagong Bayani or New Heroes smack of grand bullshit.

We have also said it that—in the program and through the evening hosts—many of the nominated films brought images of lands that are within our boundaries but are never in our mind and heart. Mindanao is that land.

In mass media, Mindanao is the site of terrorists. The other ethnic communities do not figure in this imaging. The film Limbunan by Gutierrez Mangansakan II is a film that brings us to a Mindanao that we rarely see because the splendor and political complexity of the land are not oftentimes imaged. More of ignorance and also born out of utter disregard for things that are not central and Luzon/Metro Manila/Tagalog, Mangansakan’s Mindanao is Maguindanao. With that territory comes memories of the Maguindanao massacre, not central but just remembered, or referenced. The film hovers over the rituals of betrothal and marriage. This can be discomfiting because the filmmaker refuses, as it appears, to make a commentary. The political in us, the public anthropologist even, the social worker as well and the activist demand an explanation and are about to pounce on the landscape/scenario before us. But we do not know this human group really. Ours is a central perspective with its notions of gender and sexuality. I believe Mangansakan teases us with the things we cannot scrupulously do, out there in the Mindanao of our failed imagining.

Mes de Guzman’s Ang Mundo sa Panahon ng Bato and the other film in this uncompleted trilogy, Ang Mundo sa Panahon ng Yelo, remind us one basic teaching in filmmaking: A good writing can assure a good film. The sense of storytelling is palpable in de Guzman’s work. We can feel the storyteller, engaged and passionate. The storyteller is touched and so we are touched also by the emotions or the lack of emotions in a world where children and other older children father the younger siblings. They work on boats and find their place in the seas because the land does not allow them dwelling. They die in the bowels of the earth and, at least, it is the kind of the earth that allows, however miserably, its children to live. Living in de Guzman’s literature makes us rethink whether we have moved up the ladder of social evolution.

One practical problem with independent films is securing audience for them. We all need to work toward this goal, if we are going to celebrate human life and arts and the power of arts to celebrate back the human communities.

Orson Welles said: “A film is never good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.” The films we have recognized in the Gawad Urian are fitted with eyes in the head of a poet, and this poet is one that knows the politics and the good and the evil in the land.