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Ang Paglalakbay ng mga Bituin sa Gabing Madilim
Language: Cebuano [theme song in Filipino]
English Title: The Journey of Stars into the Dark Night
Year of Release: 2012
Director & screenwriter: Arnel Mardoquio
Producers: Cinema One Originals, Skyweaver Productions, Red Motion Media, HYDEntertainment, Alchemy of Vision and Light Film and TV Productions, Conrad Cejoco
Cast: Fe Ginging Hyde, Glorypearl Dy, Irish Karl Monsanto, Roger Gonzales, Perry Dizon, Christine Lim, Darling Curay, Ethan Smith, Joffrey delos Santos, Dionalon Macalinao, Ruel Dalagan, Leony Diaz, Bagwani Amplayo, Rallaon Monsanto, Annabelle Beldua, Dave Ibao, Victor Fernandez
Led by an armed but wounded man, Amrayda Mundalana and Fatima Gumbajali traverse the forest by wading through a creek, presumably so that their tracks can’t be traced. Their guide however realizes he has been spotted and approaches an elderly man, who stabs him dead. The women avoid getting caught and make their way to the house of ten-year-old Faidal, whom his mother saved from killing by using a zip line. They bring the orphaned boy, still traveling surreptitiously, until they reach Papa Indo, to whom they want to entrust Faidal. Indo refuses but escorts the three of them to find a boat that will take them to Zamboanga. When he asks them why they don’t follow the Bangsa Moro leadership’s order to proceed to Lanao so they can organize womenfolk, they respond that they no longer wish to participate in the armed secessionist struggle. Via radio reports, Indo realizes that Faidal’s parents engaged in kidnapping for ransom while Amrayda and Fatima tell Faidal that the money his parents gave him is difficult to dispose of because it’s in dollars. When they reach a hacienda, they realize that Fatima lied about her mobile phone being unable to receive messages; Amrayda reads instructions from Amgar, Fatima’s boyfriend, telling her to live with him. Amrayda is devastated by Fatima’s betrayal while Faidal raises questions about same-sex desire conflicting with the Quran.
Ang Paglalakbay ng mga Bituin sa Gabing Madilim might seem no different from the usual run of well-intended contemporary film commentaries on Philippine tribal minorities, in the sense that it upholds the primacy of the people and their causes by refusing to spell out these details as the narrative commences. Complete outsiders will be able to pick up the information that the central characters are Tausug tribespeople and that their locale may be neither in Zamboanga nor Sabah (Jolo would be the likeliest possibility) since they discuss the feasibilities of taking boat rides to either destination. The wordless passages define the covert nature of their flight and yield fascinating discoveries, crowned by the mountainside wreckage of a drone whose roar kept them awake the night before. Yet enough information gets proffered in the course of conversations and radio broadcasts, as well as in the reading of clandestine text messages that wind up outing the same-sex relationship that would have been apparent in retrospect for viewers attentive enough to notice this dynamic. The proscribed liaison not only helps explain but also parallels its protagonists’ rebellion against the rebellion, even as the film maintains its larger critique of authoritarian systems, with imperial Manila impinging on our marginal brethren via the constant incursion of army soldiers. The definitive commentary (originally in Filipino) in JPaul S. Manzanilla’s review articulates the film’s remarkable thesis that dwells on the tension between the film’s loverly shots of wilderness and astronomical bodies vis-à-vis its urgent human conflicts: “While the fight against the government to achieve self-determination for the Moros is just, the freedom to love anyone is being suppressed in this instance. This is a problem that should be solved by a war waged in the name of love for country and this is where the democratic goal of any struggle can be tested…. Bapa Indo, the leader of the group, suggested that [the women lovers] need to understand the complications of war, that everyone must make sacrifices. Fatima, on the other hand, kindly explains to Faidal—a child whose biases and decisions in life are just being formed—the pleasures brought by a different kind of love, the stars that are also partners of the moon and the sun” (translated by the author, from “Danas ng Digma, Digmaan ng Pagnanasa [Experience of Conflict, War of Desire],” Young Critics Circle Film Desk, August 19, 2013, posted online).
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Ang mga Tigmo sa Akong Pagpauli (Riddles of My Homecoming)
Language: Cebuano [titles] & Latin [hymns]
Year of Release: 2013
Director & screenwriter: Arnel Mardoquio
Producers: BordWerkz Productions, Cinema One Originals, HYDEntertainment, Red Motion Media, Skyweaver Productions, Voyage Studios, Local Government of Nabunturan, Compostela Valley
Cast: Fe Ginging Hyde, Perry Dizon, Madz Garcia, Jeff Sabayle, Jillian Barbarona, Christine Austero, Clairejean M. Valentin, Zabrina Bacalso, Joffrey delos Santos, Zosilee Yanong, Yam Palma, Allan James L. Torculas, Lloyd Bon M. Ligones, Kenneth L. Jumamoy, Noel M. Gonez, Joprey P. Aguban, Nino M. Marquez, Dane Clark J. Ortiz, Alvert Q. Monera, Emmanuel Canama, Bryan Palma Gil, Milven Tanduyan, Jan Ryan, John Lister Montiza, Tyron Adapfar, Joseph Alferes, Rey Pequeno, Ace Rommil Ilajas, Buggy Amplayo
[Note: characters’ names only appear in closing credits] Several lumad citizens emerge and we only deduce later that these are souls of people who have died. Alfad had wanted to travel overseas for gainful employment but we first see him chained underwater; he explores his earthly dwellings with Aaliyah, girl who died while still a child. He rejects his lover Mariposa when he discovers her male genitalia, but the latter also has difficulty with a subsequent female partner, Mayka, with whom she participates in revolutionary resistance. Mariposa eventually gets lynched by religious townspeople. Wahab, the religious leader who converts the villagers, enriches himself with a suitcase of cash and flies away on a plane, which crashes into the sea.
Arnel Mardoquio’s Riddles of My Homecoming set for itself several ludic challenges, each of which would have been more than enough for most other practitioners. It situates itself in lumad (non-Muslim indigenous) territory and culture, eschews use of dialogue, disavows linearity, and draws in issues of revolutionary politics in terms of agrarian rights and sexual identity. The attempt, always on the brink of toppling over into absurdity and affectation, manages to override these dangers by resorting to symbolist presentation reinforced with a ferocious partiality for Otherness. Mardoquio’s vision might nevertheless prove to be too despairing, although no one would be able to argue successfully for nihilism, inasmuch as dark and even savage humor and suspenseful developments interlace the narrative threads. A useful preparatory approach would be to brush up on Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe’s concept of “deathworlds” in necropolitics.[1] The revenants in RoMH can be regarded as participants in an ironic social performance where their still-living acquaintances might just as well be more dead than they are. One of the film’s images encapsulates this tension: Mayka, a former comrade and would-have-been same-sex lover of Mariposa, who was viciously murdered by a Christianized mob, stands beside the latter’s soul, with only the living being marked by old age, anxiety, aimlessness, possibly regret. RoMH modulates this occasion just enough to enable engaged viewers to recall past scenes when Mariposa’s beauty and shamanic power were increasingly degraded by the encroachments of uneven development, until in the end even the environment around her was entirely unrecognizable from all the detrital abuse visited on it. The film demonstrates in an undeniable manner the paradox of our times, when necropolitan inducements can only be granted by the state to the still-living, the better to sustain its drive for interminable power and profit.
Note
[1] Necropolitics was the framework utilized by Jay Jomar F. Quintos in his article “Negotiations on Necropolitics and Death in the Cinema on the Indigenous Peoples of Mindanao,” from the anthology Indigenous Media and Popular Culture in the Philippines: Reprsentations, Voices, and Resistance, edited by Jason Paolo Telles (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), pp. 25–40, DOI:10.1007/978-981-99-9101-3_2. Achille Mbembe’s definitive articulation is from his volume Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019).
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