Canon Decampment: Sherad Anthony Sanchez

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Huling Balyan ng Buhi o ang Sinalirap nga Asoy Nila

Alternate Title: Huling Balyan ng Buhi
English Title: The Last Priestess of Buhi or the Woven Stories of the Other
English Translation of Alternate Title: Last Shaman of Life
Language: Cebuano
Year of Release: 2006
Director & Screenwriter: Sherad Anthony Sanchez
Producers: Cinema One Originals, Salida Davao, Alchemy of Vision and Light, Loyola Film Circle, North Cotabato Provincial Government

Cast: Jelieta Mariveles-Ruca, Marilyn Roque, Jun Lizada, Manay, Ronald Arguelles, Connie Bordios, and Barangay Napalico, Arakan Valley, North Cotabato

The balyan or shaman of a small rural town in Mindanao traverses her native territory as well as that of an army camp; she complains about the soldiers’ presence but they regard her as an eccentric person, affirmed by her advanced age, malformed body, and bleeding hands, occasionally offering young boys a glimpse of her pussy in exchange for money. She complains about her treatment to Jun, one of the soldiers, who is infatuated with Valerie and keeps asking about her, while the rest of the men bond over so-called boodle fights or communal eating with hands, open-air basketball games, and drinking sessions where they imbibe tubâ or palm wine. Unknown to them, a band of rebels has set up camp just outside the town, nursing a wounded comrade, attending indoctrination lectures, and singing revolutionary anthems. Two of them quarrel by a river where a lady emerges; they don’t seem to see her but their anger is appeased. One of the rebels later discharges his rifle accidentally and kills their wounded comrade; he flees the camp and returns to his residence in the town. When the balyan bleeds out and is in danger of dying, two of the soldiers carry her in a hammock. Their paths are about to cross that of the rebels, who’re transferring camp; a kid they ask for directions runs away to warn the other side.

Huling Balyan ng Buhi was welcomed as the film that set the template for millennial-era regional cinema in the Philippines, signaling a clean break from the genre-oriented and star-driven orientation of past practitioners. Remarkably, digital production was just about to entirely supplant celluloid production in the country, with director Sherad Anthony Sanchez developing a workable system out of an annual film festival’s subsidy: by locating production activity far from the capital area, he was able to devise a narrative with epic elements that would have required a beyond-average budget for a Manila celluloid project. The fact that nearly all the other independent productions boast of this potential today should not detract from the guts that HBB’s emergence required, which was why most knowledgeable reviews began with a recounting of the circumstances of its origin; even Eloisa May P. Hernandez’s Digital Cinema in the Philippines, 1999–2009 (University of the Philippines Press, 2014) acknowledged HBB as the originator of digital-indie practice in the country. Like several of his colleagues, Sanchez never stood idly by until the opportunity came along. Proof lay in the complex narrative and stylistic approach he lavished on the undertaking, with a humanist orientation (per his confirmation) deployed as his means of upholding the Mindanao natives caught in the figurative crossfire between army combatants and rebel fighters. The former necessarily come across in more idealized terms, since they function openly, unafraid of displays of playfulness and bonding, with the townspeople as their audience. It is the guerrillas, however, who exhibit dramatic turns one after another, including the narrative’s singular supernatural event. Sanchez’s refusal to resolve the tension between the two groups enables the focus on the town’s Others, specifically the balyan and two forest-dwelling orphans, to raise the open-ending query of what their fates might be. Not everyone will be satisfied with such a treatment, but then the parallels with Philippine history will yield the same type of frustration in the end.

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Jungle Love

Additional Language: Hiligaynon
Year of Release: 2012
Director & Screenwriter: Sherad Anthony Sanchez
Producers: Salida Productions, Gaps Philippines, Brass Knuckles Productions

Cast: Gloria Morales, Mae Bastes, Martin Riffer, Edgardo Amar, Aldrin Sapitan, Edgardo Amar, Melbert Pangilinan, John Grino, John Paul Fernandez, Aryid Abes, Jay-Ar Abes, Janice Fernandez, Melvil Gonzales, “the people of Minalungao”

[Note: spoilers provided] An elderly woman attempts to seduce her brother-in-law but he refuses. She leaves, taking her infant nephew with her. She then rides a bus, where the passengers are all wearing the same pig masks. Somewhere else, an urbanized young adult male masturbates and asks Mae, his girlfriend, about getting high. She refuses his attempts to have kinky sex, saying that it’s not her preference. He then encourages her to seduce their native guide, whom he describes as ugly. Anonymous naked women march in the forest, while soldiers jog on the road. Mae and her BF trek with their guide through the forest while the mother who fled with the baby walks down a creek and leaves it in a shady grove. It disappears when she returns and she panics. The soldiers’ marching band plays by a convenience store but the owner tells them that without payment, they don’t get freebies. The soldiers then jog backward up the road. As the exploring party lounges, Mae asks her BF for his shades while their guide looks over a map on a tablet so he can take them to a tribe. Mae mounts the guide playfully, then the latter walks on the mountainside, where anonymous men show up as part of the landscape and where the missing baby reappears. Mae and her partner make out in a hidden part of the forest. The guide goes over the map on his tablet, the last destination he traces being Balungao (in Pangasinan province). The mother who lost her baby enters a cave in the mountain. Mae wakes up and notices the guide jacking off to her. The boyfriend attempts to rape her but she leaves him. The guide then walks by some soldiers frolicking in the river. The mother awakens and sees forest spirits. Mae and her BF hump in the forest, but after they finish he’s appalled as she transforms into the old woman in the beginning, and he strangles her. A young soldier bathing in the river asks Mae, in Hiligaynon language, to join him. The guide sees the old lady, who flees, then finds her on the forest floor and rifles through her bag. The woman cries but the guide brings her baby to her as men walk through the forest darkness. A DJ on an unseen radio tells his listeners not to give up. Mae passes by native women dancing as she meets the guide and seduces him. Afterward the guide goes to the edge of a cliff, shouts, undresses, and leaps off. The woman with a baby talks softly to the child under a grotesque giant tree. Forest nymphs, all half-naked women, stand around. A soldier enters a near-empty barracks and addresses Amar, who then plays an online adventure game with him. The woman with the baby runs on the side of the mountain. The woman cries and her face is frozen in black and white, while the Hiligaynon-speaking soldier continues pleading with an unseen person he calls Miss. The same soldier re-emerges on the forest floor, stark naked, and climaxes. He later enthusiastically leads the marching band. A man’s voice calls out for certain people—Aldrin, Martin Gloria, Mae. The radio DJ then identifies himself as Francis Pasion and thanks donors on the air.

Possibly the only film, though definitely not the only Filipino, to win an overseas prize for pornographic excellence, Jungle Love also deserves specialized recognition as the country’s most successful sample of an experimental film narrative. The full storyline is provided here, but as anyone familiar with any experimental format already knows, reading will never suffice as a substitute for the viewing experience. Some creative sleuthing might also come in handy, since JL has become scarce since its year of release, supposedly owing to the reticence of its performers. The surprising turn that Sherad Anthony Sanchez’s creative inspiration took can still be tracked from a few surreal touches in his first full-length feature, Huling Balyan ng Buhi (2006), through a resolutely anticommercial Imburnal (Sewer, 2008), both of which were admired by organized critics; but JL is sui generis and bears comparison with only a few rare samples, and is capable of standing tall even beside these. A measure of Sanchez’s confidence is the several instances of jokiness in JL, including an insistent repetition of the same song, an adaptation of the cheesy religious pop number “God Bless You, Mama Mary Loves You” (composed by Fatima Soriano and Jerry M. Orbos, 2006) with defiantly antiwoke messaging targeting feminists, queers, the elderly, and the infirm, among several others. The same ambivalent imaging of army personnel he provided in HBB is carried over, with results that can be described as more intense: a young officer ejaculates on-cam (without masturbating, strangely), then turns into the happiest baton-twirler you might be able to find anywhere. It doesn’t make sense—nothing does, which is the point of the exercise; the not-making-sense also makes complete sense, and affirms Sanchez’s stature, alongside a growing number of non-Manila talents, as a major Philippine film treasure.

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