Documentary Filmmaking in the Philippines: A Quick Primer

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Adjani Arumpac

Documentary as “Alternative Cinema”

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The first ever locally produced Filipino feature film, Dalagang Bukid, was made in 1919 by director Jose Nepumoceno. He founded the first Filipino film outfit, Malayan Movies, and is considered the father of the country’s cinema. But Nepumoceno could also be considered a pioneer in Filipino documentary film. On the side, Jose and his brother, Jesus, took on commissions offered by the United States government between 1921 and 1922 to make newsreels, travelogues, and documentaries -- pieces that showcased the economic potential of the colonized country. Created outside of the commercial film studio system, the Nepumoceno brothers’ documentaries make up for the earliest form of alternative cinema in the Philippines, according to Filipino filmmaker and film historian Nick Deocampo[i]. In defining Nepumocenos’ brand of documentary filmmaking as early alternative cinema, there is a notable irony and paradox to be found. Although produced without studio financing, the Nepumocenos’ documentaries were bankrolled by a bigger disciplinary body: the US colonial government, which controlled the machinery behind and held influence over the world’s most powerful commercial filmmaking industry, Hollywood.

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The narrative surrounding the roots of documentary filmmaking as panopticon documentation continued until after the Philippine Liberation in 1945, when the genre was utilized by the United States Information Service (USIS) to document post-war conditions in the Philippines. The Armed Forces of the Philippines and, eventually, the government-owned public broadcasting network, the National Media Production Center (NMPC), with the help of US government funding, hired established directors from the movie industry to make documentary films that disseminated “new advances in technology, social welfare, and agriculture”[ii] to aid in the task of nation rebuilding. As such, it is no surprise that the Father of Philippine documentary Films is a soldier. After studying filmmaking in New York in the 1950s, Col. Benedicto Pinga returned and established academic institutions and film communities that eventually set the tone for the earliest film appreciation discourse in the Philippines.

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Documentary and the Third Cinema

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It was only in the 1970s when Philippine documentary films entered a new paradigm. On September 23, 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law under the pretext of quelling subversions and unrest in the country due to a worsening economic crisis.  During his reign of twenty years, Marcos stole more than $10 billion from the Philippine treasury and inflicted thousands of human rights abuses on Filipinos critical of his administration. As part of his regime, Marcos implemented stringent media blackout and censorship measures.

It was in this context of fascist rule that three frustrated government public communications employees formed Asia Visions in 1982. Lito Tiongson, Joe Cuaresma, and Danny Consumido manned a political film group that produced documentary films about the excesses of the Marcos regime. These include Arrogance of Power (1983), No Time for Crying (1986), Beyond the Walls of Prison (1987), Mendiola Massacre (1987), and Isang Munting Lupa (1989)[iii]. These films were innovative for infusing the ideology of Third Cinema[iv] into a genre that had hitherto been used as colonial pedagogical tool, as these directors added into their work new layers critical of a neoliberal government and the capitalist system in which it thrived.

Alongside political film groups, individual filmmakers produced documentary films that captured the unrest of the times. Two names stood out—Nick Deocampo, director of Oliver (1983) and Revolutions Happen Like Refrains in a Song (1987) and Kidlat Tahimik director of Perfumed Nightmare (1977) and Turumba (1981). Deocampo was a student at the Mowelfund Film Institute (MFI), one of the few film education institutions in the Philippines that operates outside of a traditional academic setting. It is the educational arm of Movie Workers Welfare Foundation, Inc. (MOWELFUND), an establishment created in 1974 to assist workers in the Philippine film industry. Kidlat Tahimik, on the other hand, took a more roundabout path, studying Business Administration in the US and then working in Europe, where he met a group of like-minded artists and his wife. He then returned to the Philippines, eager to pursue filmmaking. Though they did not directly address the dictatorship, both Tahimik and Deocampo found novel ways to represent the plight of struggling Filipinos.

After the “First People Power Revolution” toppled the Marcos regime in 1986, there was a gap in the production of documentary films from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, which pointed to a return to a public broadcasting paradigm. Television appropriated the documentary genre as a means for information dissemination, primarily with the aid of a personality/host and his/her narration of the images represented. This genre and format has been popularized all throughout the country, and remains prevalent to this day. This was where Ditsi Carolino, a well-known Filipino documentary filmmaker, started as a production assistant for The Probe Team, a pioneering television news-magazine in the Philippines that first aired in 1987 on the ABS-CBN channel. But her most notable works were produced after her film studies in the United Kingdom. Along with cinematographer Nana Buxani, she produced gritty black and white direct cinema works that depicted children living in strife, including No Time For Play (1996) and The Youngest (2005). 

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Documentary and the Second Golden Age of Philippine Cinema

At the turn of the 21st century, documentary film production came of age during what is regarded as the “Second Golden Age of Philippine Cinema.” This production boom is attributed to the “Digital Revolution” that spread throughout in the Philippines, giving creative freedom to aspiring filmmakers to produce films in spite of limited resources and funding. This paved the way for the flourishing of political film collectives, almost three decades after their predecessor, Asia Visions, established the Third Cinema aesthetic in local documentary filmmaking. Most notable in this body of political videos are Southern Tagalong Exposure’s The Din of Guns (2003) and Red Saga (2004), both experimental representations of the protracted people’s war and human rights violations in the highly-militarized Southern Tagalog region; Tudla Productions’ In the Name of Profit (2005), a documentation of the massacre of protesting Hacienda Luisita sugarcane workers; and Kodao Productions’ Mother Mameng (2013), an account of the life of an octogenarian urban poor mass leader.

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At universities, the accessibility of digital technology meant more freedom for student filmmakers, who found that they did not need to rely on big and expensive production crews. This resulted in visual and narrative explorations not unlike Nick Deocampo’s cinema verite films and Kidlat Tahimik’s autobiographical Third Cinema oeuvres in the 70s and 80s. In Ateneo de Manila University, John Torres produced the cinematographic diary trilogy Todo Todo Teros (2006). At the University of Asia-Pacific, Jet Leyco produced Ex Press (2011), an experimental docu-narrative with a fictive anti-hero whose life is based on accounts of a policeman stationed on the Philippine National Railways.

Outside of the academy, other institutions started to take an interest in the pedagogical capabilities of the genre. The Goethe-Institut Philippines and the Embassy of France in the Philippines started a joint project to support local documentary filmmaking. 
These programs led to the production of 20 documentaries from 2010 to 2014, with help from German and French documentary film experts. These films include: Jewel Maranan’s Tondo, Beloved (2011), a direct cinema representation of life in the Philippines’ biggest slum area; Ilang-Ilang Quijano’s Heart of the City (2012), a documentation of the struggle of Manila urban poor settlers facing demolition; Lauren Sevilla Faustino’s Ang Babae sa Likod ng Mambabatok (2012), an exploration of the life of a legendary, nonagenarian tattoo artist named Fang Od; Mae Urtal Caralde’s Yanan (2013), an account of the life of a revolutionary woman who died in an encounter with the military, as told by her children; Adjani Arumpac’s War is a Tender Thing (2013), an autobiographical tale of the Mindanao conflict told through the memories of the filmmaker’s kin; Babyruth Villarama’s Jazz in Love (2013), a homoerotic story between a young Filipino man and an aging German guy; Kiri Dalena’s Tungkung Langit (2013), an experimental documentary about the healing process for children survivors of natural disasters; and JL Burgos’ Portraits of the Mosquito Press (2014), an autobiographical account of the family-run newspaper that suffered harassment and censorship under Martial Law.

Meanwhile, film festivals such as Cinemalaya, which started in 2005, introduced its first documentary program in 2009. Two of the more popular titles that captured the interest of local audiences were Filipino-American director Ramona Diaz’s Imelda (2003), a documentary about Imelda Marcos, the extravagant wife of the late Philippine dictator; and Marty Syjuco’s Give Up Tomorrow (2011), a critique of the Philippine judicial system based on an account of the infamous Paco Larranaga trial. In 2013, Cinemalaya took the unprecedented step of opening the festival with a documentary film, Villarama’s Goethe Institut-produced Jazz In Love. Villarama, a filmmaker and a producer, also made another breakthrough when her foreign grant-funded film Sunday Beauty Queen (2016), a documentary about Filipina domestic workers moonlighting as beauty queens on weekends in Hong Kong, became the first and only documentary to be programmed in the revamped, state-funded 2016 Metro Manila Film Festival.

Other film festivals followed suit. In 2014, during its first year, QCinema hailed a documentary film as its Best Picture. Directed by Wena Sanchez and Charena Escala, Nick & Chai (2014) is a heartbreaking story of a couple who lost all of four of their children to Typhoon Haiyan. The following year, QCinema gave post-production grants to documentary projects such as Ivy Universe Baldoza’s Audio Perpetua (ongoing), an experimental documentary on blind transcriptionists working for the burgeoning BPO (business processing outsourcing) industry in the country; Will Fredo’s Traslacion (2015), which explored LGBT issues in a predominantly conservative Catholic country; and Sheron Dayoc’s Crescent Rising (2015), a film about the struggle of marginalized people living in war-torn Mindanao.

In 2016, CinemaOne offered a one-million-peso grant for documentary film projects. This funding helped produce Gutierrez Mangansakan’s Forbidden Memory (2016), an account of the gruesome Malisbong massacre of 1974 in Mindanao and John Torres’ People Power Bombshell (2016), an experimental documentary seeking to recreate and deconstruct the vision of the late Philippine cinema enfant terrible, Celso Ad Castillo, using materials from his unfinished films.

On the television front, two innovative direct cinema shows, Storyline on ANC and Frontrow Documentaries on GMA News and Public Affairs boosted the genre’s popularity by tweaking the format by opting to remove the ubiquitous television host in the storytelling structure. “Storyline” was helmed by journalist Patricia Evangelista and Paolo Villaluna, a filmmaker educated at the Mowelfund Film Institute. “Frontrow Documentaries” was a project of Joseph Israel Laban, a graduate of New York University’s Master’s program in journalism with a concentration in News and Documentary. With the GMA Network, Laban co-organized the Cine Totoo 1st Philippines International Documentary Film Festival in 2014, the first and only dedicated documentary film festival in the country. Among the more notable films produced by the festival were Carla Samantha Ocampo and Lester Valle’s Bontok, Rapeless (2014), an exploration of the concept of a rapeless society based on the Bontok tribe culture in Northern Philippines; Ivy Universe Baldoza’s Marciano (2014), an essay film about alienation told through the story of the filmmaker’s gay uncle who was an overseas Filipino worker; and JT Pandy’s Joy Wants To Go Home (2014), a touching tale of survival of a Filipina domestic worker in the United Kingdom.

Outside of these film festival funding and television circuits, noteworthy documentary films have also been produced through private funding. These include Kiri and Sari Dalena’s The Guerilla is A Poet (2013), a docu-narrative about the life of Jose Maria Sison, founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines; Victor Tagaro’s Yield (2015), a direct cinema montage of the lives of nine children living in dire Third World conditions; and Martha Atienza’s My Heart Was Drowned in the Sea (2014), a three-screen video installation portraying environmental degradation through human labor malpractices. Finally, Kidlat Tahimik, inspired by the possibilities by non-linear post-production, proceeded to revise and make a final cut of a prior failed attempt at a fourth feature from three decades ago, Memories of Overdevelopment. The result was Balikbayan #1 Memories of Overdevelopment Redux III (2015), a retrospective film about Kidlat’s four decades of art practice and advocacy work.

Documentary and the Concept of Nation

Certainly, documentary film today in the Philippines has blossomed thanks in part to this list of enabling forces: the formation of funding infrastructures by the government, NGOs, and international grant bodies; creation of film festivals all over the country that cultivate and support documentary film appreciation, giving rise to a new generation of cinephiles and filmmakers alike; inspiration from fellow Filipino filmmakers reaping awards in international film festivals; innovations in television documentary show formats that popularized the form and in turn spread it among a more diverse audience; substantiation of documentary film education in universities and institutions through mentorship under film scholars who are also documentary film practitioners; and the democratization of filmmaking through accessible technology.

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The bigger challenge now for documentaries in the Philippines lies not in obtaining the means for production, but rather in distribution, given the abundance of films made today. Deocampo’s proposed solution during one open forum on documentary filmmaking in the Philippines[v] was the “opening of pedagogical markets.” To foster sustainability of the documentary filmmaking practice, there should be a cultivation of audiences in schools and other spaces conducive to learning, wherein viewers can seek lessons in the myriad of social realities represented in the documentary films. Another channel being explored is the Internet platform, where a wider audience can be found. Numerous alternative media groups are now operating online, continuing the critical tradition of Third Cinema in the Philippines by producing short documentary films that expose human rights issues, which are uploaded for online consumption/information dissemination. Indeed, reality changes. As Bertolt Brecht said, “in order to represent it, modes of representation must change.”

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The beauty of the documentary film form is that its identity hinges upon a rigorous representation of reality. But “reality” is relative, its form shaped by whomever oversees its creation. The malleability of the documentary genre, which can perpetually be shaped to accommodate the worldview of its creator, is both the form’s greatest boon and its bane. We know this from documentary film’s history of being co-opted by both suppressor and suppressed (ie, freedom fighters), and the form’s spectrum of creative impulses and advocacy campaigns. As the Philippines enters its second year under the current regime of President Rodrigo Duterte—who mandated a bloody drug war that has claimed more than 12,000 lives due to extra-judicial killings, and who declared Martial Law in Mindanao—the need to represent the realities of a country in contention remains as urgent as ever. One anticipates, with bated breath, for the looming flood of documentary films and new media. These representations of realities weave together a rich tapestry of histories, widely diverse in identifications and affectations, which can contribute to a much-needed redefinition of the elusive concept of “nation.”

References:

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[i] Deocampo, Nick. (1985). Short film: Emergence of a new Philippine cinema. Old Sta. Mesa: Communication Foundation for Asia.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Roque, Rosemarie. “AsiaVisions at Sineng Bayan: Ang pagsibol,” Paper delivered at the 3rd International Conference on Filipino as a Global Language, August 4, 2012, College of Saint Benilde, Taft, Manila. 

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Post-screening discussions of the Chopshots Traveling Documentary Film Festival, University of the Philippines, April 2015

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