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Yanggaw
English Title: Affliction
Language: Hiligaynon
Year of Release: 2008
Director: Richard V. Somes
Screenwriters: Richard V. Somes & Dwight Gaston
Producers: Cinema One Originals, Reality Entertainment, Larger Than Life, & Strawdogs Studio Production
Cast: Ronnie Lazaro, Tetchie Agbayani, Joel Torre, Aleera Montalla, Gio Respall, Monet Gaston, Keith Bryan Cabañez, Leon Gaston, Erik Matti, Lilit Reyes, Juliet Matti, James Montelibano, Dwight Gaston
Amor returns to her family’s rural home after coming down with an undiagnosable and incurable illness. Her father Junior and the rest of the family soon discover that her ailment causes her to transform into an aswang or flesh-eating ghoul. Initially hesitant to harm his own daughter, Junior is driven to extremes just to protect her. But his fatherly compassion threatens to tear apart not just his family but also his small village.
Otherness will probably be the always-already underlying theme of regional cinema, proceeding from the latter’s linguistic and geographic distance from Manila-centered production. In depicting a poor rural family coping with a beloved member’s monstrous transformation, Yanggaw foregrounds this Otherness, stripping away the usual artifice of indie-digital projects and working out ways, mirroring its characters’ exertions, to cope with the challenge of low-budget genre production. The resultant shock lies as much in the monster’s capacity to generate a parallel lethal response in her heartbroken father (exceptionally played by Ronnie Lazaro), as in our realization that the filmmakers had enough backbone and brains so that they no longer needed to resort to pricey production or visual effects in order to fashion a devastating tale of familial love beyond human understanding.
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