Topos, Historia, Islas: Film Islands and Regional Cinemas

TOPOS

A line cuts across the screen between the green earthy mountains and the gray overcast skies. Three figures wearing ornate bright red garments— those of the lumad father Dawin and his children— dot the landscape. They are accosted on their way home from gathering food by camouflaged military men carrying firearms. One of the soldiers snatches Dawin’s cannikin, scatters his mung beans, and taunts him, saying, “Do you know how to pray the rosary? Pick them up one by one!”

The implication of this scene from Tu pug imatuy (The Right to Kill, Arbi Barbarona, 2017) is far-reaching if one recognizes it as a film from Mindanao, a regional island cluster in the Philippines inhabited by indigenous peoples, Moros, and Christian settlers. I watched it in horror not only because it foreshadowed the worst that was yet to come in the story but also because of where and when I saw it: in an auditorium of a private Catholic college in Compostela Valley (now Davao de Oro) in Mindanao in August 2017. Outside the auditorium, armed military men not unlike the ones in the film were on patrol, and I was anxious that at any moment, one of them would enter and watch with us a film that depicted the brutality of the military toward the lumadnon.

Mindanao, the southernmost part of the Philippines, had been placed under martial law months earlier amid widespread protests by activists who resisted any governmental move that resembled Marcosian rule.¹ Martial law was declared following sustained urban gunfights between the Armed Forces of the Philippines and radical Islamist groups, Maute and Abu Sayyaf, in the Islamic city of Marawi. This conflict went on for months, affecting the entire Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

When the soldier snatched Dawin’s cannikin, the college students in the auditorium laughed nervously, not knowing how to react to a kind of film they have never seen before, a film about familiar indigenous peoples living in the Pantaron Mountain Range surrounding their own homeplace and oftentimes forced to evacuate to the lowlands due to escalating militarization. I presumed that the film resonated with them. Tu pug imatuy, which is based on real events that occurred in 2014, fictionalizes how the military abducted unarmed lumadnon, tortured and humiliated them, and then used them as guides through rugged terrains to locate rebels and further the government’s counter-insurgency campaign. I was watching Barbarona’s film with local students and visiting delegates as part of the ninth edition of Cinema Rehiyon, a roving film festival held annually in different provinces beyond the national capital city of Manila.²

Just the day before, on the festival delegates’ journey to Compostela Valley from Davao City, our bus was halted at several checkpoints and boarded once by a suspicious soldier. He let us pass when he learned that we represented the film sector because, he said, he was a movie fan. Over seven thousand soldiers have been deployed in Mindanao since President Rodrigo Duterte assumed office in 2016, further militarizing the cities, towns, and indigenous ancestral domains, which are sought after by mining and logging corporations.³

The tense three-hour drive contrasted with the languid environment of the festival site in the municipality of Nabunturan (which translates as “surrounded by mountains”). At the time, Nabunturan boasted of a thriving filmmaking community despite the absence of movie theaters. Local residents watched films in the evenings with over one hundred filmmakers and cinephiles from different parts of the Philippines, alfresco-style in the plaza, with a setup akin to homey screenings held in Bali, Chiang Mai, Luang Pra-bang, Yangon, and other places in Southeast Asia.

At that point, I had been serving as co-organizer of Cinema Rehiyon for five years and had been observing the remarkable growth of regional cinemas for over a decade. This essay, based on my field notes, looks into the emergence of regional filmmaking in the Philippines, taking Mindanao cinema as its paradigmatic example. Drawing upon concepts from nissology and geography and illustrating my arguments with brief discussions of...