IN THOSE days when there were just black and white television sets with glass tubes in its innards, and there were only three television channels: IBC, RPN, and SBN (which later became the precursor of GMA), there was a movie that would be played at around Christmas time: A Dog of Flanders.
It was one of those stories that break every child's heart in the mold of Bambi and Dumbo on the big screen. Every around Christmas time, Dog of Flanders would be announced as among the movies to be shown. In later years, when colored TV came to be, there would be the Christmas cartoons, the likes of Frosty the Snowman and Andy and the Chipmunks, and A Dog of Flanders was no longer a regular offering.
I loved that movie so much. The unmoving dead grandfather on his couch embedded in my memory along with that scene when Nello, the central character of the movie, shared gruel with his dog, and their frozen bodies under the triptych.
I cried each time, and cried some more while reading the story in book form in those most coveted book collection that only the school library and our wealthy classmates had: The Companion Library series.
It was much later, four and a half decades to be exact when I learned that it was in Flanders where the heart-breaking awe-inspiring Christmas truce during the World War I happened almost a century after the original novel was written, and that broke my heart some more. The sadness of the story softened by one's knowledge of what happened at the Christmas truce, painting a poignant picture making you long to reach out, except that centuries separate you.
Out here, staring at the full moon, waiting for a school program to start in a faraway lumad school, I ponder on the day's art workshop.
The children were supposed to draw Pantaron Mountain Range, a mountain range inhabited by primarily Manuvu tribe, a range so rich, it is being lusted for by big mining companies. The unspoken rumblings were crying out for justice, for self-determination, for protection of a tribe's ancestral domain.
But will crying out work? We know too well that many times, no. What if we speak from the heart about our home, the range's lush environment, and its biodiversity, not as angry rallyists shouting injustice but as artists well-connected to the earth bringing out the colors of the land and our people?
In the first place, no one ever wants to listen to an angry crowd, no one even wants to stand close to one.
But art speaks, and art that speaks to the heart, draws a response from other people's hearts, just as the poignant story of A Dog of Flanders is told over and over again. Today's younger generations know the story as different versions of anime, no longer the black and white film of my childhood.