A devout Catholic prayer leader, a dedicated sister, a woman who fell in love with the enemy — who was Casiana Nacionales and what was her role in the Balangiga encounter of 1901?

Award-winning broadcast journalist Jeff Canoy answers these questions and delves deeper into the history of the September 1901 attack by telling the often untold story of Casiana in the ABS-CBN DocuCentral documentary Ang Babae ng Balangiga.

The town of Balangiga, Eastern Samar was recently in the spotlight after its famous church bells were returned to their original home in San Lorenzo de Martir last 15 December 2018. Before American troops took the bells as war loot, historic accounts told the story of the Balangiga uprising, the United States’ worst defeat at the hands of Filipinos.

Often left out of the narratives is the Visayan woman who played an important role in one of the Filipinos’ biggest victories in the Filipino-American war. Jeff finds out more about the unsung hero by meeting the individuals who knew Casiana personally and learned of her story through oral tradition, and attempts to sort out fact from fiction. The documentary also puts a face to her name by having an artist render a portrait from the descriptions of those who still remember her.

According to Jeff, the story of the Balangiga encounter deserves to be told, especially because the events of that time mirror issues happening today.

CANOY with his award at the New York Festivals. “There’s so much more to the story than what we’ve seen in history books. It’s important to revisit this because we’re so used to hearing stories of our people’s oppression that we rarely celebrate our victories. Balangiga is a story worth celebrating, and Casiana’s bravery, who she was, what she did and how she subverted societal expectations from women at that time should be heard by everyone.”

Jeff is fresh from recent wins here and abroad, including awards from prestigious competitions like the New York Festivals in the US, Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards in France, Society of Publishers in Asia’s 2018 Awards, a Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature and a Marshall McLuhan journalism fellowship from the Canadian Embassy in the Philippines for his stories and documentary on the Marawi conflict. Here in his latest documentary, which he wrote, the Red Alert anchor will also tell the full story behind the Balangiga bells and what it truly means to the Balangiga people.

“There are so many lessons we could learn even though it all happened over a century ago,” said Jeff. “This is similar to the story of Marawi in the sense that it’s uniquely Filipino — it is a story of a community and its people, and those are the stories I love to tell.”

The documentary premiered last Sunday in ABS-CBN. It can be viewed online via iwant.ph.