Culture Movies

The myth of theaswanghas always been used to bring pesky kids to heel; in this documentary, it is the government that has terrorized the citizenry into obeisance. By ANDREW PAREDES

It feels right that first-time documentarian Alyx Ayn Arumpac should present the spectre of Dutertes bloody drug war as a bogeyman. InAswang, which won the critics FIPRESCI Award when it premiered last November at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the director provides hushed, intermittent narration about the catchall Philippine monsterwhich covers everything from shapeshifters to vampires to the infamousmanananggalas images of bodies sprawled on pavements unspool onscreen. The myth of theaswanghas always been used to bring pesky kids to heel; inAswang, it is the government that has terrorized the citizenry into obeisance.

Not that youll see much of the government in this full-length documentary. No government officials are interviewed, and Duterte himself is portrayed only as an effigy to be burnt. Arumpacs mission is to take you straight to the ground where the carnage occurs, on the streets where the battlefronts in the administrations war on drugs are drawn every night. Or more specifically, as one activist who runs a morgue for John Doe corpses puts it in the opening minutes of the film, a war on drugusersnot on druglords. As per this concerned citizens speech, his funeral parlor once used to process around one corpse a month; in the months after Dutertes ascension to Malacaang, it started to receive around a thousand bodies a day. By December 2016, based on real numbers data, the running total of John Does being brought in had ballooned to 31,232.

The statistic is a sobering one, and fairly anonymous.Aswangdoesnt care to identify its protagonists or provide names to the people whose traumas and tragedies are portrayed onscreen. Thats because the victims of Dutertes war on drugs are themselves nameless. They are the poor huddled in cramped hovels whose faces are taped up then dumped on the streets by shadowy death squads. They are the weeping mothers who lament their beautiful sons murders. They are brothers whose pent-up angeramazinglydoesnt stop them from declaring, I am for Duterte but what they did to my brother is wrong.

Sometimes a case will flare up and ignite momentary indignation, such as the 2017 slaying of 17-year-old Kian Loyd delos Santos, whose dying words to the police were a plea to be spared because he had a test the following day. And it is at Kians wake in Caloocan thatAswangintroduces us to the documentarys putative hero: a precocious little boy identified only as Jomari, who raps with his friends along garbage-strewn estuaries and stages mock police raids using scavenged scraps of wood as weapons. Jomari is another kind of orphan to the drug warboth his parents have been jailed on charges of drug useand so he is left to wander the streets alone, becoming ourde factoguide.

Halfway through the documentary, Jomari drops out of sight, andAswanggains suspenseful mileage on the question of whether both the mythologicalaswangof our collective nightmaresand the metaphoricalAswangof the documentary had finally coalesced and claimed him. As Arumpac and her crew set out to find him, they interview a faceless woman who describes in minute detail her time being imprisoned in a secret cell at the back of a Manila police station, a dank, narrow space hidden behind a cabinet where she and fellow detainees allege policemen kidnapped them and kept them without charges, extorting thousands of pesos from them in exchange for their release.

But, as the documentary points out, neither this bombshell discovery in April 2017 nor Kians homicide the following August were enough to rouse the populations anger, nor put a dent in Dutertes popularity. (An eyebrow-raising radio report once placed the public support for his drug war at 85 percent).

Its a lot to take in, which probably explains why other documentaries likeThe Kingmakerfalters when it tries to shoehorn Dutertes drug war into other topics. There is just so much violence, so much paranoia, so much heartbreak, evenAswangs harrowing 84-minute running time cant possibly unpack everything about this waking nightmare.

But whatAswangdoes right is frame its subjects in impeccable aesthetics. Tanya Haurylchyks stark cinematography benefits from Arumpacs callbacks to Brockas bleak palette in such social dramas asMaynila Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag, and editors Fatima Bianchi and Anne Fabini keep things moving at an unremitting pace. And of course, there is the genius of Arumpacs narrative gambit: theaswanghas long been used to terrorize and lullAswangasks us if we will ever wake up.

Aswangwill be available to stream starting Saturday, July 11, until Sunday, July 12. Visitaswangmovie.com,the films Facebook pagefacebook.com/aswangmovieor the films Twitter accounttwitter.com/aswangmovieat around 6pm Saturday for the link to watch it for free.

Photos from the official website

Read the rest here:

This award-winning docu on the drug war is quiet, suspenseful, impeccably-made - ABS-CBN News