Crafting scenes for Mindanao histories and literature

This film festival will focus on Mindanao’s literatures and histories — new finds in Mindanao’s histories from the researches of young historians based in Mindanao, not yet recorded in history books, of course.

Reading the mood of our times, we feel that it is about to usher in a turning point for Mindanao’s histories and literatures through film. May the government listen to the country’s writers, historians and filmmakers.

The Mindanao Creative Writers Group Multi-Media Arm (MCWG MMA), in cooperation with Capitol University (CU), launched the film festival SineHistorya with a forum on 28 November 2019 in Cagayan de Oro City.

This film festival will focus on Mindanao’s literatures and histories — new finds in Mindanao’s histories from the researches of young historians based in Mindanao, not yet recorded in history books, of course.

The literatures of Mindanao, on the other hand, should already be subjects for films not only to infuse them with fresh ideas but to popularize as well Mindanao writers’ interpretations on settings and fictive characterizations based on lived experiences.

The Lit Film forums hosted by four universities in Mindanao — Ateneo de Davao University, Mindanao State University General Santos, Central Mindanao University and Capitol University — started last year. These later morphed into SineHistorya to include the histories of Mindanao likewise for classroom use.

SineHistorya 2020 joins other film festivals in Mindanao catering to different audiences and their needs. It is one more avenue for Mindanao’s filmmakers to showcase their works. Being homegrown, they can best explore, re-conceptualize or recreate themes that are deeply rooted in their own cultures. Being better informed because having grown up with Mindanao’s diverse cultures themselves, they have understanding of what it is like to live alongside different groups of people every day of their lives, which should be appreciated.

There is indeed a lot of difference at being a native versus an outsider who misappropriates tales and legends, incorporating these in films without deep research, ignoring sensibilities of peoples and cultural sources, thus insulting or misrepresenting an ethnic group or community, putting them at a disadvantage.Claims of poetic license is unacceptable when there is cultural basis for a practice or image put forward in film.

The speakers, in turn, talked about Mindanao’s literatures and histories that should help local filmmakers promote the rich tapestry of Mindanao’s cultures.

We have said this again and again: No one person can talk about Mindanao’s diverse languages and cultures, much less have the right to title a film “Mindanao” when talking only of one situation and one Mindanao group, and misappropriating the legend Indarapatra and Sulayman.

Different experts should share their expertise about the epics and contemporary literatures, the fabrics with numerous patterns and colors of various ethnic groups, food, weaponry, governance, and other cultural practices, not to mention the numerous languages and their variants and/or indigenized languages being spoken around the island.

MCWG MMA board chairperson Santiago Diokno, a writer, filmmaker and producer, in his keynote address, said SineHistorya should augur prominence for Mindanao films covering her culture and arts in the 21st Century. The films should open wide doors to share timeless treasures of our world of cultural ingenuity, precolonial civilizations, tales of poignant struggles and spell-binding epics.

Referring to the country’s hundred years of cinema, he emphasized that film is a potent medium and is a “tool for our history to open our world each time we remember our past, our ancestors and our heroes.”

The historian and anthropologist Artchil Daug, quoting Jacques Lacan’s notion, said that “there is no such thing as sexual relations,” and argued that “the past does not exist, i.e. “there is no natural law that determines human relations with the past.”

Daug said the past must be made to exist either as history with its linear narrative or as culture within the repetitive process of tradition, rituals, epics, songs, etc.

Because the “I” needs stability and history, and culture stands to provide stability, it is imperative that in the portrayal of history or culture in films, a filmmaker or screenwriter should be aware of the power to determine the very being of who watches films, Daug said.

He added that history is hermeneutic, and historians engaged in hermeneutic relations with sources are for the historian to better understand his sources and to improve his interpretations of these sources so within this circle, the interpretation goes deeper. Ideally, filmmakers and screenwriters ought to do the same with their sources, to allow these sources to speak.

Iligan filmmaker Kiss Campano showed her own three-minute film without dialog as springboard in tracing briefly the beginnings and elements of the short film. Campano’s short film highlighted the silent victims of pedophilia, a prevalent social problem.

Fictionist and director of Binisaya films Januar Yap gave tips on how to write scripts after showing his short film Huwebes Huwebes, often lyrical because of the fusion of poetry in the dialog, with typical Cebuano spoken in the streets and with English subtitles.

Yap’s film is a social commentary on the complex drug problem. But Yap did show the unfortunate end of a loser, a drug peddler’s life, wanting to redeem himself by engaging in drugs “for the last time,” as they all say, but with disastrous results.

This writer, for her part, talked about Mindanao’s literary sources for filmmakers sharing briefly the transformation of literature to film. Fictive narratives make for freer interpretations compared to recorded histories because movie directors are relatively free to reconceive plots from fiction to film. While fictionists and filmmakers engage in the creative process, film, according to novelist Mary Snyder, is like drama for it is a “visual, verbal and aural medium presented to an audience.”

In the SineHistorya Summit in May this year, about seven participating historians rued the fact that many filmmakers do not engage in deep research for their films, which can be disadvantageous, knowing that films either confirm the public’s existing mindsets or they change perspectives. Apart from this, appropriation and misappropriation of culture were also tackled during this launching of a new film festival for Mindanao.

What were most stimulating during gatherings such as SineHistorya was the off-forum sessions with the speakers engaged in informal discussions on the topics taken up during sessions with the audience and the sharing of behind-the-scenes anecdotes over gourmet meals.

Like a parallel activity to adaptations and with our hosts Gel Inte and Luc Azrael Igot, the writers and filmmakers had fun sampling indigenous desserts transformed into cosmopolitan delicacies like sizzling binaki (steamed mashed corn grits) lathered with hot caramel syrup and the fried binignit (tabirak) mixed with ice cream in a coconut shell at Cucina Higala, one of Cagayan de Oro’s top restaurants owned by the ingenuous chef John Uy.

Apart from writing skills, the insistence that filmmakers and screenwriters undergo training in basic literary and historical researches should be a requirement apart from tackling an important petition to ask the government to help fund the making of, for starters, historical dramas like what is happening, alongside private efforts, in Korea, Japan, Turkey, China and other governments in producing quality historical and literary films of these countries. In this case, who knows?

SineHistorya may still expect the government to listen, to support and expect transformations such as quality historical and literary dramas in a concerted effort from writers, historians and filmmakers from the south, filled up spaces to dream big on and in color.