The Manila Times

The painful burden of ‘Katips’: A film review

ANTONIO CONTRERAS

IHAVE not seen the other nominated films and performers against which Vince Tañada’s “Katips” competed and won in the recently held Famas Awards. I would, however, assume that whoever were the members of the board of judges, that they were fair and competent. Winning seven awards, including Best Picture, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, should be a fair basis to opine that Tañada’s work was deserving compared to the rest.

However, what I can only safely judge is what I saw when I personally watched the movie, an experience which reminded me of my years at the University of the Philippines in Los Baños, watching those anti-Marcos plays staged by various campus theater groups, most notable of which was Teatro Umalohokan. There is actually nothing in “Katips” that I am not aware of, since I am not ignorant of the atrocities that were inflicted on student activists and rebels. Having said this, I still cringed at the brutality and inhumanity inflicted on them by agents of the martial law state at the time. The graphic representation of them being tortured with fingernails pulled, backs flat-ironed, testicles electrocuted and women raped are things that still shocked me.

These are things that happened, and no amount of justification that they were rebels or enemies of the state, can erase the fact that under international law, political detainees should not be subjected to torture. This is exactly the same reason that until now, even if he is already president, that I would really admire him more if President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. can at least personally apologize on behalf of his father under whose rule such inhumanity occurred. It is not to admit direct responsibility, but simply to acknowledge that somehow, he lost control over his own government that led to this inhumanity.

There is no doubt that “Katips” is frank and brutal in its politics, where tales of human rights violations are woven in the tapestry of love stories between protagonists. There is no denying that this is a narrative that still needs to be told. Tañada was propelled by his mission to educate people, especially the younger generations. Unfortunately, the challenge is that before one can educate, he has to first make people watch his film. And obviously, the 30 souls with me in that large, cold theater, replicated in other venues nationwide, is a fundamental reality check that there is a problem in the manner these messages are being communicated to their target audience.

The oppositional voices around which Tañada and artists like him gravitate are faced with the bitter reality that people have grown tired of and have very little appetite for an in-your-face oppositional discourse. This was further cemented by the toxic divisiveness that devoured our political landscape like a plague during the recently concluded elections. But instead of recalibrating, reframing and re-strategizing, Tañada appeared to have doubled down, as he sought a head-on collision with a political narrative that propelled a Marcos heir into the presidency.

The movie had already been shown late last year. There was no reason for Tañada to push for a rerun. But he insisted on using his movie as a counter-punch to “Maid in Malacañang,” in the same way that presidential candidate Maria Leonor Robredo decided to run to stop a Marcos from becoming president. And the result was disastrous for both “Katips” and Robredo, with the latter losing by a wide margin at the polls, and the former eating dust at the box office.

This is most unfortunate simply because the overall message of “Katips” needs to be told and seen by people, notwithstanding the detectable flaws in its storytelling that appeared incoherent at times perhaps due to the fact that there were just too many love stories and too many characters which the film wanted to present and dwell on.

The movie showed stories and images that represent events that I can personally attest to have actually happened. But there has to be a new way of telling them, and not in the way Tañada did it in “Katips.” He and those like him who endeavor to inform people about the horrors of martial law should rethink and reimagine how to go beyond their usual captive crowd. They have to evolve out of the “let me educate you” approach which has been soundly rejected by people.

But aside from the problems with the messaging, “Katips” and other similar films about martial law face a more fundamental problem. If they become successful in mainstreaming their narrative, then that becomes the best argument against the very core of their content, one that undermines their message. For example, the fact that they are able to show films like “Katips” freely, where communism and rebellion are in fact celebrated, and where Marcos Sr. is demonized, and which even won awards, at a time where Marcos Jr. is already president, robs them of the platform to use the movie to campaign against a repeat of martial law and the Marcoses.

Finally, movies like “Katips” should really be more careful in attacking revisionism when they also are not faithful to historical facts. In “Katips,” there is a glaring error in the scene at the UP Collegian when there was a reference to the shoes of Imelda Marcos just after the declaration of martial law, when everyone knows that such was only revealed years after in 1986. But this would appear petty when compared to the more egregious mistake, embodied in the lines of the former communist rebel turned writer played by Tañada himself who mused over the significant role of the communist ideology in the downfall of Marcos Sr., when the historical fact is that the Left boycotted the snap elections in 1986, and was absent during EDSA. For a movie that purports to be the contrapuntal to the revisionism allegedly embodied in “Maid in Malacañang,” this erroneous claim was painfully fatal.

Front Page

en-ph

2022-08-11T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-11T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://digitaledition.manilatimes.net/article/281530819797313

The Manila Times