ON November 4, 2025, with Typhoon Tino on its path to northern Palawan, I traveled with a team from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts to Puerto Princesa. No worries, we were assured, as no strong typhoon has ever ravaged the island of Palawan
I was to represent the cinematic arts as a film critic and educator, the first time that a film component has been included in the ‘Budayaw’-a combination of the Bahasa Indonesia word ‘budaya’ and the Filipino word ‘dayaw’, which means good or beautiful-a grand cultural exchange among the member countries of the Brunei Darussalam-Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines East Asian Growth Area (BIMP-EAGA).
The festival has for its goal the strengthening of the regional ties through the celebration of shared cultural diversity and heritage.
Held every two years on a rotational basis among the member states, Budayaw is now in its fifth edition. This year’s festival will feature a series of performances, capacity-building programs highlighting biocultural governance, and cultural tours designed to promote mutual understanding and collaboration among the BIMP-EAGA countries.
As part of the festival, participants are invited to join various creative and cultural workshops facilitated by esteemed artists and cultural practitioners.
My task was to look at the interface of culture and cinema. I had to look for a handle-a key concept with which I can approach the subject matter. There was, I remember, the book by James Clifford titled Writing Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. In one of its chapters, I read Vincent Crapanzano and he was saying how ‘the ethnographer is a little like Hermes: a messenger who, given methodologies for uncovering the masked, the latent, the unconscious, may even obtain his message through stealth. He presents languages, cultures and societies in all their opacity, their foreignness, their meaninglessness; then like the magician, the hermeneut, Hermes himself, he clarifies the opaque, renders the foreign familiar, and gives meaning to the meaningless. He decodes the message. He interprets.’
In this workshop, two key concepts shall be operating: the concept of culture and the technology of cinema.
Under culture, we are looking at the methodology of ethnography, where the anthropologist or the outsider gets inside the society. The process is not simple and is characterized by a dialogic relationship. We are always interacting with other people and with the other elements in the community. The relationship is also multivocalic, meaning, there are many sounds involved in our interaction with other elements in the society. The languages in the form of songs and dances and literatures, for example, are ways in which we enter a society.
For this particular workshop, we want to engage with the technologies of arts by way of this form called cinema. Cinema has evolved from merely imaging to the birth of the talkies or the advent of sound. Where before cinema was seen as entertainment, it went on to become the major narrative of the histories to a point where cultural workers began to ask if cinema was not only dictating the story of the period but influencing the mores of the times, the morality of the people around.
Even at this point, we are always asking the question about the impact of cinema or movies on the morality or conduct of the people around.
It cannot be denied that in academic settings, i.e. classrooms, films are taken seriously as forms of discourse. Films or motion pictures have ceased to be merely fun but become vehicles for truths or messaging; in other forms, cinema has become crucial tools for learning about identities, the self, and nations. The splendor of cinema has grown into other shapes and tools so that there are now films that are viewed as facts and not as fiction; at times, the line between the imaginary, the flights of fancy, and the fantastic are blurred to contain within them the real, the contentious, the historical and total social facts.
In this workshop, I decided to focus on two short films. One was by Sheron Dayoc and its title is Angan-Angan or Dreams; the other was Elvert Bañares’ Sa Paglupad ka Banog or The Flight of the Hawk.
In the short film Angan-Angan, Dayoc has placed at the center the mute character of a girl named Satra. She is from the Yakan community.
As with any film criticism or film education engagement, so much depends on the composition of the audience. For that afternoon, a majority of the audience was Indonesians. First off, they responded to the title as it was familiar to them. The shock of recognition was a good entry point for the audience.
As the story unfolded, it was then surfaced among the participants of the workshop that the gender of the main character and her being mute were significant elements in the narrative of the film. That the fact of being mute enabled the audience to supply the language of the girl.
The second film examines the epic of the Panay Bukidnon. Dense and rich in treatment, the film by Elvert Bañares looks into the epic as told first by the grandfather. The story materializes before our own eyes as the cinema visualizes the story of the ancient heroes. Toward the end, the dance is performed by the members of the community as the heroes of the epic watch over the performance, a testament how through the years culture keeps alive not only the traditions but also the people that embody said practices.
At the end of the two films, the crucial question was to examine to what degree is the human person autonomous of culture.
We are also asked to look into the task of the arts, which in this case is one of intervention. The film as technology allows man or society to intercede, to mediate between man and nature and culture.