Bagane Fiola surprised everyone during the recently held Quezon City International Film Festival with a work that was so unusual, it didn’t seem to belong to any kind of recognizable genre. Baboy-Halas is the title of the film, and it went on to win the plum for Outstanding Contribution in Cinematography.
The film has been described in many ways, but “original” seems to be the greater impression the film and its filmmaker have created for the audience.
Fiola is one of the many new minds from the Mindanao region. In my list, Fiola is joined by Arbi Barbarona and Ryan Murcia. These three, it must be said, aren’t the only compelling filmmakers from that region. There are many more and, as I start to think about them, I’m already counting in my mind those amateur (for lack of a better term) filmmakers from the Compostela Valley, whose works were nurtured by the Nabunturan film community.
Before Fiola, Barbarona and Murcia, there were other filmmakers exploring the landscape of Mindanao and giving us their own perspectives of this region we describe as “troubled”. Teng Mangansakan Gutierrez and Arnel Mardoquio are two powerful filmmakers that come to mind.
The power to deterritorialize is what I would ascribe to Fiola. Three of his short films illustrate this charm of Fiola, this graceful, sometimes funny, almost campy, but never silly attitude to events happening around. He doesn’t film plots as he plots films.
In Pakbet, the title and the food do not particularly identify anything Mindanaon. The story does not sprawl in the density of a Mindanao town, but is packed within the confines of what looks like a tony condominium. One can’t feel any extant religious or political conflict. What is in the short film is a ghost story that is quite scary. The phantom in this film is a young girl who appears everywhere from nowhere.
In Eat Durian and Multiply, two lesbian lovers eat durian in the manner that will make tourist officials uneasy. Once our staid officials overcome their moral qualms, then they can start worrying about the title. Here’s a filmmaker making use of a notorious fruit by dropping all the old stereotype about eating durian. The old belief points to durian as an aphrodisiac; thus, we understand the frenzied sex in the film that followed the eating of the fruit. But what about the murder that followed after the love?
Arbi Barbarona has a different way of picturing his Mindanao. There are no politics on the surface, just first-class gore in Barbarona’s film Haylo (Conned), which he codirected with Esther Mendez. In the film, a petty thief is recruited to steal a motorbike. The conman, however, has a plan to kill the man who commissioned him to do the theft. All throughout, we see a young girl with a doll, looking spaced out. We think the girl is a leitmotif but, in fact, she is as real as any plan to kill. But the film has another design: the thief will be killed in the end. His stomach will be sliced out and eaten.
Barbarona, during the eighth Cinema Rehiyon, was asked why he was doing a zombie movie. The filmmaker said the horror and the terror in his film is his way of paying an oblique tribute to a city known for vigilante killings.
Barbarona is a technical person, having done sound, editing and cinematography. He’s also a visual poet, lending his vision and sense of images to films like Ang Paglalakbay ng mga Bituin sa Gabing Madilim, and the underrated and vastly misunderstood Riddles of My Homecoming.
Ryanne Murcia is becoming the sophisticated chronicler of gay identities in Chavacano de Mindanao. A rarity in the indie world, Murcia has acted and directed in two of his best short films. One film is titled Apasol (Chasing Sun), a tremblingly lyrical and quietly disturbing moment in the life of two lovers. They spend their last day together, the farewell ruled over by the sun that will set on their love. I remember being enamored by this film and writing about how the two very young lovers watched the tree filled with their wishes that may not come true anymore. That tree of life was also the tree of lies. Against the untruth, I felt the pain of the two young men were palpable and real.
In his latest work, Ryanne Murcia directs and acts again. The film is Entre Medio Del Fin (In The Middle of An End). The story is about a gay couple who wants to adopt a baby. In their home lives Ayesha, who is pregnant with a child promised to Danny and Khalil. In the end, the adoption doesn’t come through.
Collapsed in a few minutes are the realities of marriage and motherhood made more complex by the gay relationship.
A touching scene in the short film shows Danny and Khalil, in the warmth and intimacy of their bedroom, looking up the ceiling as the roar of a chopper passes by. That is the only hint of Zamboanga, where they live.
What these new minds can bring out of Mindanao are more images, as varied and as difficult as the ones we want to remember of the region. The universalizing trait of cinema stops at the boundaries of Mindanao because in that place, there are realities beyond the battles and the bombings. There are slices of lives, however tiny, in Mindanao that can still fill our mind with more questions and answers about this last frontier of our nation, The narrative of Fiola, Barbarona and Murcia are new stories from the field. They carry the tension from the towns and villages of a region strong in Islam. The films these filmmakers make seem to fight against this landscape. Their subversion is one gift from the land that has coded its places with rigidity and dogma.