Canon Decampment: Mikhail Red

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1—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

A busload of passengers is passing through an abandoned field at night. Next day, 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.

2—Neomanila

Year of Release: 2017
Director: Mikhail Red
Screenwriters: Zig Madamba Dulay, Mikhail Red, Rae Red
Producers: TBA Studios, Artikulo Uno Productions, Buchi Boy Films

Cast: Timothy Castillo, Eula Valdes, Rocky Salumbides, Jess Mendoza, Ross Pesigan, Angeline Andoy, Angeli Bayani, Ron Villas, Raul Morit, Shandii Bacolod, Donna Cariaga, Astrid Hernandez

Toto’s capable of running fast because as a street kid, he earns a living from snatching. His older brother, imprisoned for some unspecified petty crime, asks him to report a well-known drug pusher, since one of the standard covert practices in fascist President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs is palit-ulo (literally head-swapping), where a suspect surrenders a higher-ranking criminal in exchange for favors or freedom. After his girlfriend informs him that the guy he has to find is dead, a plainclothes narc named Irma, who was his mother’s friend, checks up on him. When he discovers next day that his brother’s jail was bombed, he confronts the gang that he suspects of the act but they proceed to mess him up. Irma saves him from getting killed and, since he no longer has any family left, he accompanies her on the extrajudicial rubouts that she and her partner and lover Raul have to accomplish. However, Toto is still unused to cold-blooded killing and protests when one of their targets is a mother who brought her infant child with her.

The problems that confront the country’s dispossessed offer no reprieve regardless of political regime. This principle plays out in the two consecutive works by Mikhail Red that happened to straddle the end of the last liberal-democratic President and the start of the first authoritarian President since the earlier Ferdinand Marcos. As it turned out, Birdshot was set in a distant rural locale while Neomanila was in a slum community adjacent to the business district. 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 gifted aspirants could propose subject matter that implicitly criticized the political system by insistently focusing on 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 since then, so Birdshot’s presentation of a local reality so insulated that the disappearance of a busload of politically significant passengers can be successfully hidden from outside investigators, does not fully square with the traumatic real-life horror of the 2009 Maguindanao massacre that it apparently references. The narrative’s seriocomic factual 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 by killing the policeman, along with any prospect for moral clarity. Neomanila’s dramatis personae, in contrast, respond to the terrors of an openly oppressive political system either by banding together in gangs or, where family is still available, by fulfilling whatever filial injunctions may be passed on to them. When the protagonist, still barely an adolescent, finds himself divested of relations and rejected by his would-be homies, he turns toward parental figures who welcome him for his ability to run, during the historical moment when emergency situations could profit from such a skill. None of these safety-in-numbers options works out satisfactorily for anyone concerned—although the movie’s canniness lies in how it offers glimpses of affective connection between substitute mother and abandoned son, enough to prepare us to empathize with the latter’s insistence that children are any war’s true victims, and to dread the easy prospect of rupture. The country’s film output as a whole attains a certain salience during periods of authoritarian repression, although this property will still have to be described, explained, and evaluated; when cinema of the Duterte drug-war gets defined, preferably in comparison with the Marcos martial-law era, Neomanila deserves to be one of the foremost items to be sampled.

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