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Iskalawags
English Translations: Scalawags; Rascals
Language: Cebuano
Additional Languages: Filipino, English
Year of Release: 2013
Director: Keith Deligero
Screenwriters: Keith Deligero, Gale Osorio, Remton Siega Zuasola
From Erik Tulban’s story “Kapayas (Papayas)”; with lines from “Sa Aking mga Kabatà (To My Fellow Youth)” (1868), attributed to José Rizal, Celso Ad. Castillo’s Asedillo (1971, written by Castillo), and Pablo Santiago’s Hindi Ka Na Sisikatan ng Araw: Kapag Puno Na ang Salop, Part III (The Sun Won’t Rise for You: When the Container is Full, Part III, 1990, written by Pablo S. Gomez & Jose Bartolome)
Producer: Deligero & Co.
Cast: Kerwin Otida, Reynaldo Formentera, Windel Otida, Johnreil Lunzaga, Joriel Lunzaga, Micko Maurillo, Mark Lourence Montalban, Jeric Raval, Dionne Monsanto, Michelle Acain, Mariah Gonzaga, Marcheta Ortiz, Narciso Dizon, Rey Samaco, Ramil Alcordo, Edwina Alcordo, Jobert Lucero, Pina Gonzaga, Robertson Tampus, Erik Tuban, Keith Deligero, Lawrence Ang, Fel Louise Alingasa, Jerome Villamor
In Barrio Malinawon, an islandic town in Cebu, seven male friends can’t wait for school to end so they can hang out, talk about movies starring their idol Jeric Raval, and embark in new adventures in one another’s company. Led by their self-appointed leader Palot (who claimed precedence over the rest by being first among them to grow pubic hair), they adopt the loanword iskalawag, which was used as the title of a popular action entry. They set as their goal the acquisition of humongous papayas they heard were growing in the garden of their teacher Ma’am Lina, but along the way they live out typical teenage hijinks mostly from the pursuit of illicit thrills, replicating their classmates’ admired declamations in Filipino by mouthing dignified populist speeches uttered by Fernando Poe Jr. in Asedillo (Celso Ad. Castillo, 1971) and in Hindi Ka Na Sisikatan ng Araw: Kapag Puno Na ang Salop, Part III (The Sun Won’t Rise for You: When the Container is Full, Part III, Pablo Santiago, 1990). The appearance of the flesh-and-blood Jeric Raval to attend to his personal businesses as Ma’am Lina’s military husband demonstrates the power that their imagination holds over reality.
The exemplary final chapter of Bliss Cua Lim’s The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (Duke University Press, 2024) contains as exhaustive a reading of Iskalawags as anyone can ask for. To the casual viewer, the film might appear to be a takeoff from the feel-good multicharacter youth films of the Second Golden Age. But then it goes way beyond the realist premise that typified those products. The closest to a Milinawon territory anywhere is a small district in Mindanao, and even the preteen poem ascribed to Rizal and recited from memory in the characters’ classroom is considered a false attribution by historians, thus challenging standard notions of reality premised on acceptability. Drawn from director Keith Deligero’s autobiographical experience, the Iskalawags narrative moves temporally back and forth in retelling a formative event in the shared lives of its gang of seven, until it flashforwards to an indeterminate future with the story’s narrator en route to an uncertain destination. Lim points out how certain details in the film’s design may be anachronistically outmoded or advanced, although in the use of Betamax technology, Deligero himself interjected to point out how a technological trend considered passé in imperial Manila denotes prosperity in the margins for people who have no other means to access the pop culture they crave, in the government-prescribed language they have to study. Iskalawags also stakes more than a linguistic claim to Cebuano cinema: the celluloid-era products from the region fiercely partook of genre appropriations, in contrast with the Europeanesque-arty approaches marshaled by the digital-era generation who might have been too eager to distance themselves from the commercialist anxieties of their predecessors. Iskalawags could be more comfortably situated with, to name a rare available sample, Joe Macachor’s Ang Manok ni San Pedro (St. Peter’s Rooster, 1977), a comedy, originally shot in super-8mm. in order to provide the region with its first color film, where an easy-going peasant gets killed by a rival for a woman but is rewarded in heaven with a magical gamecock. Iskalawags’s fantastic counterpart arrives when Jeric Raval, the title gang’s movie idol, materializes as the husband of the teacher whose papayas they crave, but stumbles upon her after his counterinsurgency activities, during her moment of indiscretion with a younger lover. The kids suddenly witness everything as members of an outdoor-screening audience, perhaps as a way for them to frame the traumatizing event that was about to unfold before their voyeuristic eyes. In managing to maintaing its tonal equanimity to this point and beyond, Iskalawags enables us to think through the many implications of its plot and purpose.
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Lily
Language: Cebuano
Additional Languages: Filipino, Hiligaynon, Japanese, English
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Keith Deligero
Screenwriters: Pam Miras, Timmy Harn, Keith Deligero
Script Consultant: Dodo Dayao
Producers: 8thumbs, Bards sa Kasamahan, Heritage Productions
Cast: Rocky Salumbides, Charlton Dano, Shaina Magdayao, Rey Samaco, Natileigh Sitoy, Enrie Estevez, Mikka Cabreras, Chrystal Alesna, Sunshine Lim, Georgette Nunag, Gurprit Singh, Kathleen Pador, Niña Igot-Makipig, Nicole Blackman, Tuesday Zabala, Zalde Lapiña, Ligaya Rabago, Edwina Alcordo, Gale Osorio, Chloe Novie Solasco, Darcy Arguedo, Baby Boy Arellano, Jvi James Luib, Ruel Dahis Antipuesto, Lawrence Ang, Gladys Areopagita, Ronnie Gamboa Jr., Ric Rodrigo Porminal Jr., Denzel Yorong, Hesus Deligero, Ramil Alcordo, Juvel Alvarez, Mario Lowell Baring, Anecito Disuacido, Charles Lim, Fel Louise Alingasa, Romy Warain, Earl Vincent Ramirez, Lav Diaz, Eula Valdez, Remton Siega Zuasola
In hunting for a sigbin, a mythological creature regarded as an aswang’s (native vampire’s) pet, Mario Ungo is distracted by Lily, who hides him in her convent after he suffers a mysterious injury. Mario falls in love and lives with Lily. Although not averse to participating in criminal activity, he’s forced to kill a burglary victim, then claims that he will be unable to provide adequately for Lily and their child if he stays put. Despite Lily’s protestations, he decides to migrate for work in Manila, where he is reduced to servitude in the employ of better-off people. At one point in his job as security guard of a plush subdivision, he winds up killing an arrogant driver. He also falls for Jane, a nightclub dancer, and they cohabit when she gets pregnant. Lily however has also set out for Manila to find him, her face displaying an unsightly self-inflicted scar.
Lily is an example of what we might term a maximalist approach to filmmaking, as opposed to minimalism. Such a project would necessarily turn on the sustenance of paradoxes, starting with the association of this strategy with the big-budget pursuit of presenting as many elements as possible in order to attract the greatest number of viewers; the fact that the project is not just independently sourced, but regionally centered as well, may have therefore put off evaluators when it first arrived. The film advances itself with an audacity that can be better understood by going over its director’s fairly recent output. Preferring to immerse in genre expression rather than art consciousness, Keith Deligero first tinkered with elements of suspense and the prison film in Kordero sa Dios (Lamb of God, 2012) as well as comedy and the youth film in Iskalawags (Scalawags, 2013). With Lily, he furnished the usual elements of horror closely associated with rural settings by Philippine audiences, but incorporated the most innovative technical devices ever seen in a local sample of the genre, exceeding the peak achievements of older, mostly gone specialists. Major characters’ appearances shift sometimes in the same scene (complete with a nervy reversal of roles in a Catholic confessional), and the erratic, discontinuous, occasionally repetitious cutting provides a distinctly cinematic experience of uncanny disorientation in the narrative’s reality effect (described by Deligero in an email response as “like putting back pieces of the mirror that Lily broke in one scene”). As if seeking to further top off this already formidable challenge, Deligero introduces an inside joke that keeps advancing toward external dimensions: the male character starts out wearing a jacket inscribed with the director’s regional film festival, and reveals a T-shirt after being felled by an unidentified assailant, on which the director’s previous film title is displayed. At a peak horrific point much later, the entire production aesthetic suddenly turns conventional, in the best way our most accomplished filmmakers could execute; the reflexive twist, too delightful to divulge, should be left up to curious explorers to discover. Underlying the entire situation is the profound and melancholy pathos of rural natives grappling with the prospect of permanent poverty by seeking better prospects in the metropolitan capital and discovering there how their status is even further downgraded; the native female, already oppressed in her local habitat, experiences twice the degradation, even if she happens to possess supernatural abilities. In a perfect world, a talent such as Deligero’s should be deluged with offers—a prospect that may yet arrive, if we can fix our deeply flawed critical mechanisms.
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A Short History of a Few Bad Things
Language: Cebuano
Additional Languages: Filipino, English
Year of Release: 2018
Director: Keith Deligero
Screenwriter: Paul Grant
Producers: Binisaya Movement, ABS-CBN Film Productions, Cinema One Originals
Cast: Victor Neri, Jay Gonzaga, Publio Briones III, Maricel Sombrio, Kent Divinagracia, Hesus Deligero, Rey Samaco, Arnel Mardoquio, Julius Augustus Ambrad, Felicismo Alingasa, Ryles Cameron, Mel Baquiran, Remton Siega Zuasola, Crezzo Paz, Vitto Neri, Shiela Hontingoy, Fe Louise Alingasa, Alieza Despojo, Keith Deligero, Nony Pador, Alice Castro Dizon, Bebot Arias, Minerva Gerodias, Eric Bico, Zeny Nepomoceno
Felix Tarongoy and Jay are described by Ouano, their perpetually highly strung chief, as an ideal police investigation team for being smart and handsome respectively. Despite strict orders to follow their supervisor’s instructions and report to him at every turn, Felix interrogates witnesses to the drive-by assassination of a prominent local businessman in Cebu and identifies Tito Abog, an ex-military officer, as suspect. He proceed’s to the latter’s well-off residence and makes the acquaintance of Maria, Tito’s sullen, intimidated wife. Tito confronts Felix and Jay in Ouano’s office, confirming his and Felix’s background in counterinsurgency operations, and threatens Felix with retaliation for discounting their shared past. Running into Maria in public, Felix finds out from her that Tito’s plantation worker also witnessed the killing. Just when Felix thinks he’ll be able to solve the crime, a series of new killings throw more mysteries his way, making him fear for Maria’s safety.
A Short History of a Few Bad Things will resemble a light workout after the complex gymnastics of Lily. In fact, as studies of Classical Hollywood affirm, its genre consistency and singular vision are deceptive properties that could easily trip up less-prepared practitioners. The script of ASHFBT benefits from the contribution of a well-schooled outsider who took up residence in a regional center and participated in academic challenges, acquiring fluency in the native language along the way.[1] Since the Communist Party of the Philippines observes Maoist prescriptions, the protracted guerrilla war it has waged for way over half a century finds its way into the country’s most dispossessed rural territories, with counterinsurgency soldiers often opting to retire early due to the trauma of combat operations. ASHFBT leans on the tragic irony of the most idealistic members of the Philippine armed forces, who would otherwise have proved heroic fighters in the people’s war, being understandably regarded as no different from their less-scrupulous comrades by those who survived their offensive maneuvers. The apparently serial attacks that erupt midway in the narrative could thereby be read in this context, but the film grounds itself in the anxious, conscientious, yet outwardly impassive delivery of Victor Neri, far removed form his teen-idol appearances, redolent of Jaime de la Rosa in Gregorio Fernandez’s Cold War spy caper Kontrabando (Contraband, 1950), minus any hint of smarm. The performance assists in recuperating whatever cynicism might prevail in the material: good intentions will never guarantee positive outcomes, but the moral clarity they provide does make for powerful storytelling. In an interview with Bliss Cua Lim, Keith Deligero described Iskalawags, Lily, and ASHFBT as comprising “an incidental trilogy on the politics of languages,” and definite as ASHFBT‘s formal departure from the other two might seem, its counterfeit final titles ironically represent a more triumphant resolution than its actual closing credits.
Note
[1] Essential disclosure: Professor Paul Grant once interviewed me regarding canonization activities, a way in which this capsule review potentially catalyzes its own mise en abyme, for those inclined to reflect on reflexive activities. See Paul Douglas Grant, “The Transnational Pastime: An Interview with Joel David,” Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society, vol. 14, no. 1, June 2017, pp. 135–145. In returning full circle to the topic of Cebuano movies, Grant is better known as co-author (with Misha Boris Anissimov) of Lilas: An Illustrated History of the Golden Ages of Cebuano Cinema (University of San Carlos Press, 2016). A related issue is that the term proposed by Grant and Anissimov in place of “regional cinema” is “vernacular cinema,” which Keith Deligero also strongly prefers inasmuch as, per Bliss Cua Lim, “it exposes the provincialism of Manila culture and the unacknowledged linguistic ethnocentrism that its long-unchallenged dominance fosters” (“Binisaya: Archival Power and Vernacular” chapter in The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema, Duke University Press, 2024). While radically ideal, however, such a semantic adjustment would be tantamount to a displacement of nearly all the other categories and premises in Philippine cinema, so it should first be applied in a comprehensive account of non-Manila film production.
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