THE grand sweeping films set in the urban heartland revealing the decay and corruption in national life portray just one half of the reality puzzle. The drugs, murder, corruption, and mayhem are all but true and make for great cinema that unveils how life is in the country’s urban squalor.
The recent film Buy Bust is one that offered such a grim and hopeless picture of what it is like in these closed-in and densely populated environs bursting with people during these difficult times.
But what takes place for the most part in rural idyllic Philippines most of which, at least, geographically are in island form? What are the stories of Filipinos in the last frontier, so to speak, relatively isolated from the political and economic centers? Do their tales matter? What facet of the Filipino fortitude and struggle do they exhibit and how do these contribute to the grand contemporary Filipino narrative?
It is a testament to the power of film and those at the helm behind the lens that through the medium, they are able to zero in onto these disparate realities and highlight the differences and similarities. Like a telephoto lens or a magnifying glass, directors deftly adjust the angle and depth of their cinematic vista to illuminate these hidden realities for their audience to consider.
In his recent film Signal Rock, Chito Roño trains his sights, this time, on life in a small island community off the coast of Northern Samar. The title of the film pertains to the jagged rock outcrops jutting out from the shoreline of Biri island – the only area where cellular network signal is accessible for the towns people and where they congregate to get in touch with relatives and the rest of the world.
The rocks are a symbol of the community’s isolation but at the same time a cinematic marker of how their lives, no matter how geographically isolated they may be, are tied to the larger political economy of the nation and the world. The trusty Nokia 5110s assume a supporting role in the film as the conduit between a whole economy of emotions that connect Intoy and his family, the film’s protagonists, who reside in the island, and his elder sister, Vicky, an overseas Filipino worker abroad embroiled in a domestic custody issue over her daughter with her Finnish husband.
The plot of the film revolves around the effort of the amiable and well-loved Intoy to resolve the dilemma of his sister. He achieves this by consolidating the town folks to rally around his cause to prove her sister’s financial capacity to raise her daughter independent of husband. This meant falsifying documents of properties and businesses owned by their neighbors and acquaintances to make it appear that Vicky owns all of these – a plot that the community: from the town mayor, municipal registrar, parish priest, and almost everyone in the rural town, rallied behind.
There is no moral judgment here about how corrupted the ploy is. Instead, we are introduced to the flexible standards of little people who come into solidarity with one another because they have found a common cause.
The ease with which such plan was hatched and executed show that there is an understanding of the balance of forces. Between the desire of a town mate, Vicky, to keep custody of her daughter versus the bureaucratic power of her Finnish husband who even enjoys influence and control in these parts through their embassy, it was clear which side the community took. In a David and Goliath kind of fight, the underdog always wins the audience, more so in a home court setting.
The film actually offers contemplation on the sociology of “making do,” or the various ploys and practices of the powerless to survive in an asymmetrical world where the odds almost always are stacked against them.
Intoy, the character, actually personifies these alternative practices of power where he, as the community’s go-between guy, serves as the actual conduit of this power and the mechanism for ironing out the social kinks to ensure collective harmony. Commenting on the continuing labor export policy of the State, the film reverses the balance by arguing that it takes a community to send and take care of an Overseas Filipino Worker abroad.
The film may be regarded as an allegorical tale of how insular communities work vis-à-vis the political and economic pressures of the outside world. At a time, when the narrative of the dominant nation-state is being rammed into acceptance through the drug war, the BOL, the war against ethnic minorities, and the counterinsurgency operations of the military into rural communities, this little film provides an oblique cautionary tale. Small-town community solidarity can trump alien narratives of State order and claims of legitimacy - a challenge to the State-backed nationalism that is being forced nowadays into acceptance by officialdom as the only contemporary Filipino narrative.