2019 Metro Manila Film Festival Entry

'Mindanao' (2019)
Genre: Drama

‘Mindanao’ is real and deserves our serious attention as Filipino film audiences, not as elitists but as social changers and believers

By Joey Ting

Undoubtedly, the film ‘Mindanao’ is real. In many aspects, particularly the plight of the Mindanaoans, against injustices brought about by corruption, rebellion, drugs syndication, poverty and diseases, the film describes what realism can do to change our perceptions towards abuse of power and social struggle on lands territorialized by the pros and cons of the government.

A 59-year old production designer for advertising turned multi-awarded filmmaker Brillante Ma. Mendoza, is now an important figure / personality in contemporary Philippine cinema today, an instrumental for peace influence in the country, not too late an age to contribute to the very confused and intertwined entertainment and film industry’s diaspora. Hence, the full wisdom, experience and immersive process brought Mendoza in his films into a pedestal of respect and honor. The government film agencies should start curating his body of work that depicts an extended form of combinations silhouetting Mike De Leon’s expressionism, Ishmael Bernal’s surrealism, Lino Brocka’s social realism and now, young Mikhail Red’s hyperrealism. The embodiments of these forms provide Mendoza’s truthful naturalism, almost like a ‘Cinema Verite’ in the 60s of French filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch and the term at present.

In ‘truthful naturalism’, as I proposed in contemporary film interpretation of auditory and visual procedures, the theoretical description emancipates a chilling effect, almost anxious and physically disturbing to audiences who are capacitated with health problems and issues towards heart problems, hypertension and other blood-related diseases. This happens when you get to watch purposively cinematic films as therapeutic as ‘Mindanao’ to confront change in the existing body system, Furthermore, it values an explanation on the discomfort of natural sensitivities and sensorial impediments such as the feast of eyes and ears to hurdle the delicate balance of trusting the film and denying it as a form of entertainment.

However dangerous, ‘Mindanao’ only captures the elitists; the educated, the intellectualists, not the ‘so-called’ masses of vendors, farmers, fishermen, rural townspeople, rebels and poverty level victim of parasites because the filmmaker’s approach has never been ‘empower-mental’ to them; to society; to nation, nor it has never been ‘temperamental’ to strengthen the anthropological behavioral patterns and much awareness of the masses to change. The dilemma is, of course, hypocritical since I see these characters as ‘victimized’ by the leisure of power in entertainment. More so, the works of director Mendoza capitalize on preferentially the ‘victims’ of the social ills and decadence. Mendoza cannot end it with that state condition. He needs to go beyond the film and stir a propaganda or movement  of people empowerment and action.

‘What do you want to happen Direk?’ is a serious question from the contemporary criticism of art and society. You have given us films ‘Ma’Rosa’ (2016), ‘Thy Womb’ (2012), ‘Lola’ (2009), ‘Kinatay’ (2009), ‘Serbis’ (2008), ‘Tirador’ (2007), ‘Kaleldo’ (2006), ‘Masahista’ (2005). Why do you victimize the real people from your characters in all of your films? How would you explain the plight of these real people when all you need to do, as you have said in your previous interviews, is to TELL A the STORY? After you tell a story, what happens to the ‘victims?’ In the animation and the famous for the older generation, the epic ‘Indarapatra’t Sulayman’ are characterized by chieftain heroes in Mindanao who laboriously fight against fantastical characters of throwing fires dragons to save the land. Parallel to the fight against the rebels or anti-government armies, the government soldiers confront the sensitive war against what? There are no clear parameters why they fight so badly. Lastly, women who bear children with inborn sickness and environmental diseases due to pollution and climate change also fight against the tyranny of health disadvantages.  

Multi-awarded actress Judy Ann Santos’s portrayal in ‘Mindanao’ is genuinely and authentically performed, thanks to her excellent eyes on screen. She wins the MMFF 2019 Best Actress recognition because she was truthfully ‘victimized’ by the horrors of life, not for the sake of trophy but because she has thought perhaps to influence and to communicate thoroughly to all the women of the world who suffer and struggle with kids dying of still incurable cancer or malignant diseases tainted with hopelessness, while, despite the irony of soldiers too as they embark themselves in the atrocities of wars in the Southern Philippines in absurd and hopeless circumstances.

When I immersed myself for a week recently years back along with other scholar delegates in conducting a theater arts workshop for a group of people at ‘NPA-infested’ town of Dumingag bordering Zamboanga Del Sur and Norte, I could not physically see the violence and the bloodshed in my stay but the tension and danger grew in my system as days passed and it could really be felt and eventually slowly hearing the cries of the community in their eyes, body movements, and souls and those who were up there scalloping the mystical mountain ranges are there only to survive. To conduct the workshop is just a facilitation of what is more relevant than to hear their plights and screams of terror, of absurdity, and of social decadence that perpetually have become the victims of today’s cancer themselves.

The film ‘Mindanao’ is a testament that film educates and must foster and invite theorists-filmmakers to do ‘theoretical experimentation.’ You become a filmmaker because you want to prove a ‘speculation’ and not just to tell a story, a bullshit cliché of those who pretend to be a filmmaker just to be famous and rich. Let us not go out to the world and pretend as if we are like the circus players of our own circus show. The audiences are our allies and they can feel the maturity of artistry in artists and in the arts. Thus, maturity in understanding Philippine cinema is compelled and should establish a forum of creating more theories and speculations of the film as a medium as we understand how film can influence the world in categorically numerous frames per second.

Watch ‘Mindanao’ for social change sakes! Go to the cinemas while it is still being shown.