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Dawn of Freedom
Alternate Titles: Liwayway ng Kalayaan; Fire on That Flag!; Ano hata o ute
Additional Languages: English, Japanese
Year of Release: 1944 / B&W
Directors: Gerardo de Leon [as Associate Director] & Abe Yutaka
Screenwriters: Ryuichiro Yagi & Hideo Oguni
Producers: Eiga Heiku Sa, Toho Company, & X’Otic Films
Cast: Leopoldo Salcedo, Fernando Poe, Angel Esmeralda, Norma Blancaflor, Rosa Aguirre, Shigenobu Kawazu, Ichirô Tsukida, Denjirô Ôkochi, Fred Montilla, Carmen Rosales
During World War II, Filipino soldiers Captain Reyes, Captain Gomez, and Lieutenant Garcia leave their families in Manila to join the fight against invading Japanese forces in Bataan. Once there, they discover that Filipino troops are abused by their American counterparts. Gomez wanders into the Japanese camp and discovers a different reality, while Reyes and Garcia are betrayed by their American allies.
This singular epic, produced by the official film agency of the Japanese during World War II,[1] provided themes that other Filipino filmmakers would only be able to take up years later, after the emergence of anti-imperialist nationalism in the late 1960s initiated questions about the country’s one-sided preference for US domination. Seen today, the images of (homoerotic) fellow-Asian camaraderie set against unmitigated American duplicity are capable of delivering a primeval jolt. It is a wonderment drawn from the parallel-universe speculation of how things might have turned out if the West—as fantasized, understandably, in Dawn of Freedom—had lost the war, and probably not as badly as our worst fears might have convinced our forefathers then. After the defeat of the Japanese, Gerardo de Leon avoided the wrath of the returning US colonizers because certain members of his production team testified that he had assisted their guerrilla activities. Since then, he understandably avoided any overt suggestion of the pan-Asian ideal tackled in this film: his immediate postwar output was either silent on the question of the Philippines’s Asian identity or, as in the unnecessarily extended World War II prologue in 48 Oras (48 Hours, 1950), insistently and apologetically opposed to any such possibility. Dawn of Freedom’s propagandistic function, including footage of the Japanese’s victorious battles in the Philippines, may have required false depictions of the realities of the Imperial Army’s atrocities as well as of the local resistance to the occupation, but then any number of action quickies produced after the war were similarly guilty of plugging into the reverse bias of being pro-US, and therefore anti-fellow-Asian. Reduced to the question of which type of propaganda film has a more constructive message, Dawn of Freedom deserves to be high, if not on top, of the list, its cinematic integrity serving as icing on the cake.
Note
[1] The goal of imperial Japan was to promote a “Greater East Asian Cinema” as an essential component of its “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” (Janine Hanse, “The New Earth: A German-Japanese Misalliance in Film,” in In Praise of Film Studies: Essays in Honor of Makino Mamoru, ed. Aaron Gerow and Abé Mark Nornes, Kinema Club, 2001, pp. 184–97). For a sample of (necessarily pro-American) anti-Japanese propaganda, the well-known Atrocities of the Orient (also known as Outrages of the Orient or Beast of the East, directed by Carlos Vander Tolosa with new footage provided by William H. Jansen, 1948) may be sourced at YouTube.
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