By Carmen Aquino Sarmiento

MMFF Movie Review
Mindanao
Directed by Brillante Ma. Mendoza

MINDANAO, Brillante Ma Mendoza’s latest (Metro Manila Film Festival (MMMFF) entry, humanizes as well as mythologizes the second largest island in our archipelago. We can all relate to its great themes: serious illness and death, the suffering of little children, families riven by war. Admittedly though, we, the so-called Christian lowland majority, are largely ignorant about our “Muslim brethren,” or the Moro, which is how the Islamic societies in the Philippine South now call themselves.

Here, they are all too human. Saima (Judy Ann Santos) helps her cancer-stricken daughter Aisa’s (Yuna Tangog) cope with her pain through the re-telling of the saga of the brothers Raja and Sulaiman, and their battle with the enemy dragon spouses Ginto at Pula. The Princess Aisa is a character in this tale, shown through animation, just as the little girl might imagine it. The battle cry for these fragile children to be brave and keep fighting against their dread diseases, is repeated by the other parents at the House of Hope Transient Patients Home and Hospice. Aisa and her mother stay there, in between treatments at the Southern Philippines Medical Center. When death comes for one so young, you do not give up that easily.

Ms. Santos’ Best Actress awards are well-deserved. One senses Saima’s strength as well as her infinite sorrow. She is helpless to protect her child against the cancer which is her death sentence, but she must remain strong for her. She sniffs at the empty strawberry ice cream container — that was Aisa’s favorite flavor — as the scent is a way to remember her. Little Yuna Tangog was utterly convincing as a retinoblastoma patient. That is an especially cruel cancer which first eats away at the eyes. It usually afflicts toddlers and preschoolers. Often the only way to stop its nefarious progress is to remove the cancerous eyes, while continuing other treatments.

The celebration at the House of Hope and the testimonies of the survivors sympathetically depict the community among the poor who look out for one another in their suffering. It is to be hoped though, that after they saw the conditions there, a big star like Ms. Santos or the successful director Mendoza himself, might donate at least two sets of institutional size cookware (one for halal, and the other not) to the House of Hope. That way, these poor mothers, already burdened with having to care for their patients, would be spared the inconvenience and expense of having to bring their own cooking pots and utensils. It would definitely make for a smaller carbon footprint and a greater sense of community, for them to pool their resources and cook just one big pot of rice and two large batches of halal and non-halal food, rather than kaniya-kaniya (every man for himself).

Saima’s husband Malang (Allen Dizon) is an army medic who must be away in battle while his child is dying. The director Mendoza has declared, “Whether we like it or not, when we say ‘Mindanao,’ people relate it to the conflict there. Therefore, you cannot just make a film about Mindanao and not mention the conflict.”

The Maguindanaoan public intellectual, Datu Gutierrez “Teng” Mangansakan, curator/director of the Salamindanaw Asian Film Festival differs: “We do not deny that conflict is part of our history, but Mindanao is more than that. At a time when we are faced with tragedy and disaster, we rise beyond our differences and see our common humanity.”

What we Christian Lowlanders would take as simply a moving film about family tragedy which just happens to be set in Mindanao, apparently has other far-reaching reverberations, especially among the Maguindanaon, the ethnolinguistic group to which the protagonist Malang belongs. Mindanao has 13 distinct ethnolinguistic groups of Moro with their own cultural practices and traditions. Mr. Mendoza was called out for “ignorance of the dynamics and peculiarities of Bangsamoro geopolitical reality and experience.” A respected personage from Basilan has endorsed Mindanao and a Tausug academic was the production consultant. However, it was pointed out that those worthies are not authorities on Maguindanaon or mainland reality and cultural specificity. Cotabato City’s Alnor Cinema, the only movie house in the Bangsamoro region and in Maguindanao, where this film is supposedly set, did not screen Mindanao The Movie during the Christmas holidays.

Datu Mangansakan found strong elements of the Maguindanao ethos in the film, eg., of alamatan (foreboding or premonition) and of mulka and bagkiyas(retribution). He cites the sequence where Malang’s best friend, the soldier whom he calls “Buddy,” (Ketchup Eusebio) visits Aisa in the hospital, and brings her pansit which he jokingly tells her is for long life, although he knows she’s dying of cancer. Later, on the way to a military operation, Eusebio’s character gets a loving call on his cellphone from his son who’s celebrating his birthday. Datu Mangansakan explains that in Maguindanaon, this is an instance of “kaalamatan sikanin” or the foreboding of a dread event. In the next scene, “Buddy” is killed. “Nabagyasan nu wata” for his insensitive remark to the dying child Aisa. Datu Mangansakan goes on:

“In an earlier scene, the Maguindanaon soldier Malang (Allen Dizon) performs the sagayan (the Maguindanaon war dance) wearing both his military uniform on and the tiered skirt of the sagayan dancer, embodying both the hero and the antihero. Towards the film’s end, he is wounded in the military operation, and misses his daughter’s funeral. ‘Nabagkyasan nu bangsa nin’ or in Filipino ‘na-karma’ (got his comeuppance) for bastardizing his own tradition.”

Datu Mangansakan has written about how when the Bangsa Moro resisted the American Colonial presence, cinema was used to represent them as “The Other”: “Because the studios were some 300 miles from Mindanao, the construction of images of the Moro has been marred by misrepresentation rooted in ignorance of cultural traditions, as well as religious prejudice and discrimination that mirror the prevailing political, historical and social climate, rendering the Moro as a subaltern: unable to speak, voiceless.”

Still, to have big stars such as Judy Ann Santos in this film; Cesar Montano in Bagong Buwan (2001; Marilou Diaz-Abaya) and Nora Aunor in Thy Womb (2012; Brillante Ma. Mendoza) portraying Muslims, has been a cause for elation among the Bangsa Moro. Even Datu Mangansakan recalled how when Bagong Buwan was shown, for so many Moro, “It was as though our identity, our struggle and our very existence have been validated via the big screen. Suddenly we have become larger than life, our narratives made part of the national consciousness.

“Mainstreaming of Moro narratives gives us a positive jolt and that is totally understandable. But we must be able to discern beyond the cosmeticism provided by our exotic culture and traditions, and the portrayal of armed conflicts that have been our truths for many Ramadans past. We must also be able to determine the intention why the same narratives of our people are perpetuated, thereby cementing them in the national imagination. We Moros should not be passive players in the hegemonic business of appropriating the Moro image and narrative. Mga pagali ko, the subaltern can now speak! We must endeavor to create the Moro image and narrative ourselves.”

By Carmen Aquino Sarmiento

MMFF Movie Review
Sunod
Written and directed by Carlo Ledesma; co-writer Anton Santa Maria

Sunod is unusually sophisticated for the Filipino horror genre. Its terrors subtly operate along several levels. There is the stock opening nightmare scene in the graveyard, replete with howling winds, swirling black veils and snakelike tree roots. It’s not real, but what follows is still hair-raising — not your grandmother’s Shake, Rattle En Roll. Cineastes agree that it was downhill there, after the very first in the series, or post-1984.

Olivia Sason, a.k.a. Liv’s (a coolly restrained Carmina Villaruel) very existence is already a horror story: she is an unemployed single mother with a seriously ill 12-year-old daughter, facing mounting hospital bills all alone. No one, not her daughter’s father, nor her own family or any friends are around to help her. Her desperation is palpable as she applies with a call center known as LGO (Liboro Global Outsourcing) at a job recruitment fair in a downtown university. She is accepted solely on her spoken English skills. She swallows the humiliation of being at least 20 years older than most of her fellow agents in training, and is not as tech savvy as them. Her maturity serves her in good stead, however, when she successfully projects the authority of a supervisor (which she is not), thus retaining a valuable client. The fire breathing dragon lady CEO, Karen Liboro (Mylene Dizon) even fast tracks her regularization. Being a casual or endo contractual is a living nightmare for most of our work force.

Sunod was touted as the only horror film entry for the 2019 Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF). However, each of the short, student-made films which opened every main features, did have a horror theme derived from our traditional lower mythology — aswang, manananggal, multo, etc. This film’s production polish has much to teach our student filmmakers. There are ever so subtle shifts in the lighting with each scene change: from the lighter blues and greys of the hospital, which segue into the darker steely shades of the call center, where one never knows whether it is night or day, and everything is mechanically scripted and constrained. There is an ambience of death and decay in the moldering yellows and mysterious shadows of the Liboro Building, where LGO occupies the top floor, and a washed out, shabby weariness to the small home with its worn furnishings, which Liv and her young daughter Anelle (Krystal Brimner who, like her character, is also 12 years old) share. The tall Gothic statues of dramatically backlit dark angels in the foyer of the Liboro Building, on whose top floor the call center holds office, are pure camp. They could be props from Hammer Studios. The music is brazenly manipulative, too obviously prompting us to cringe, and triggering the racing of our pulse rates, but this is a minor annoyance given the film’s otherwise outstanding production values.

This tale of possession is reminiscent of the classic The Exorcist (1973, by William Friedkin). The girls in both films are around the same age, and are both being raised by single mothers. In The Exorcist, it is a supernatural demon who takes over Regan (Linda Blair). In Sunod, another child, Nerissa (13-year-old Rhed Bustamante, looking like she belongs in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children), who happens to be the resident ghost of the Liboro Building, enters Anelle. The dramatically negative personality changes which may come with adolescence make child-raising a real-life, terrifying experience for many parents, and doubly so for a single parent going it alone.

But it is not just Anelle and Nerissa who are not whom they appear to be. Even Liv’s supervisor Lance (J.C. Santos) whom she initially took to be her knight in shining armor as his full name, Lancelot, implies, turns out to be just another prick. From his perspective, one might call it a fair quid pro quo, since he does ante up for Liv’s enormous debts. After kneeing him in the groin, she still deposits his check.

Liv’s barely concealed indignation when the LGO call center human resources department refuses her request for a huge advance on her salary, as well as her earlier flash of temper when the job recruiter was about to turn her away, hint at why she might be all alone in facing her problems. It seems she has used up whatever good will she might have had with her child’s father, her family, or other friends.

There is only Liv’s officemate and new-found confidant Mimi (Kate Alejandrino) for now (no spoilers about what happens to Lance), who’s available to drive her and Nerissa/Anelle, so that Nerissa can find her long-lost mother Perla (Susan Africa making crazy eyes), and finally be at peace, then leave Anelle’s body for good. The delightful Ms. Alejandrino ably serves up the film’s few moments of levity. Mimi frankly admits to being a professional call center trainee, simply so she can collect the training allowance, without the accountability, stress, and aggravation of actual BPO employment. Nerissa/Anelle transforms into a human Waze as she directs Mimi through the winding slum alleys. Mimi glances in her rearview mirror at the literal whites of the possessed Anelle’s eyes, and deadpans, “No, she’s not scary, but this is so-o-o crazy.”

At least in Sunod, the laughs are intended, unlike in such ineptly made horror films, particularly of the slasher sort. Think of Topel Lee’s Bloody Crayons, (2017, based on the Wattpad novel by Josh Argonza) where the audience is ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing) each time there’s a victim. The horror of Sunod unexpectedly grows on one with the appearance of the red ball of thread. In the film’s first part, Liv threads beads into necklaces and bracelets with innocuous clear nylon, as she keeps vigil by Anelle’s hospital bed. Here, the red thread ominously recalls the tik-tik’s tongue, which slithers through gaps in poor peasants’ pawid (nipa thatch) roofs, to vacuum up embryos in uteri, through the pregnant woman’s navel. Lonely Liv’s greatest fear is her daughter’s dying, but there’s more than one way to lose a child.

The color red and the idea of tethering might be an homage to Jordan Peele’s Us (2019). In astral travel, there is said to be a silver thread which tethers or connects one’s etheric or astral body to the physical body on this earthly plane. This ensures that one does not remain in whatever worlds one might encounter elsewhere, but be able to return to this planet. However hellish life here might be, the astral plane may not be all that great, as this film shows. In fairness, the world in which Liv temporarily finds herself in, does resemble an art gallery installation.

The red thread also brings to mind the Fates in Greek Myth: Clotho who spins it, Lachesis who decides upon the length each living being might have, and Atropos who with finality, cuts the thread. In the end, Liv is doomed, though exactly how her end might come about, and whether she will take her beloved only daughter with her, we may never know. Now for her at least, that is scary.