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Birdshot
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Mikhail Red
Screenwriters: Mikhail Red & Rae Red
Producers: Pelikulared, Tuko Film Productions, Buchi Boy Films
Cast: Mary Joy Apostol, Manuel Aquino, John Arcilla, Arnold Reyes, Dido de la Paz, Elora Españo, Ronnie Quizon, Rolando Inocencio, Suzette Ranillo, Angelica C. Ferro
Maya is taught by her father Diego, the sole tenant of a plot of farmland, to handle a gun. Against her father’s warning, she crosses the fence of a forest sanctuary and, once inside, shoots and kills an endangered Philippine eagle. In order to investigate the whereabouts of the missing animal, Domingo, a rookie police officer, is instructed by his station commander to drop his investigation of the disappearance of a bus of farmers who were planning to go to Manila to protest the harsh conditions that landowners, in collusion with corrupt government officials, were imposing on them. Domingo persists in following up the earlier case but is pressured into focusing on the disappearance of the eagle, leading him on a collision course with Maya and her father.
The promise that Birdshot’s filmmaking talent holds forth is a throwback to the heady days of the then still relatively benign years of the 1970s military dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, when the country’s most talented aspirants could propose subject matter that implicitly criticized the existing political system by focusing on simple and focused narratives of survival. This resulted in a few instances of verisimilitude that martial-law authorities were quick to seize on, so Filipino filmmakers during the Second Golden Age managed (for the most part) to be subtle and ambivalent whenever their material came too close to mirroring real-life events. Such considerations no longer impinge on the generation of talents behind Birdshot, so its presentation of a local reality so insulated that the disappearance of a busload of politically significant passengers can be successfully hidden from investigators from the capital, not to mention global media, does not fully square with the traumatic real-life horror of the 2009 Maguindanao massacre. The narrative’s horrifically comic real-life incident of an older male peasant shooting down an endangered eagle to be able to cook tinola, or poultry stew with green papaya and chili leaves, is transformed here into the case of a young maiden similarly unaware of the consequence of killing wildlife—in a government sanctuary that she entered surreptitiously, against her father’s injunction. The plot opts instead to turn on character transformations that affect the protagonists: frustrated by his superior officers’ corruption, an idealistic policeman vents his anger on the wildlife-killing suspect’s father by torturing the latter; the daughter then responds to the police force’s violence by killing the policeman, presumably along with his ideals.
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