IT was in 1988 when a film was completed and released. The dictator had left the country; a new president had been sworn in.
The word “people,” for the first time, became a modifier as it was attached to “power.” People Power coined meant the people were the power and not the traditionally insular concept of people possessing the power. There was euphoria all over the land.
But something was amiss. There was trouble in the air: politicians in power either ignored the discord or were ignorant about it. There was a new idol—this soft-spoken widow whose gender was the target of traditional and male-ordained politics.
The “rustling of the leaves” would not stop, as the title of this documentary about those days preceding the days of the end of the dictator and the beginning of what many Filipinos then thought of as auguring of the new day.
The documentary is called A Rustling of the Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution. Ominous is its homecoming as the opening film for Daang Dokyu, the country’s first documentary festival of its kind. Immediately, one realizes what the festival proposes: a presentation of truths as captured by a film medium whose core is reality as compared to the celebrated artifice of even the most realistic of feature films.
Immediately, we confront the “revolution” in the title of the piece? Shall this include the Edsa Revolution? If it does not, what is truth in those four days of uprising, which was co-opted as a miracle?
The documentary directed by acclaimed Canadian documentarian Nettie Wild is definitely not about the four-day miracle crusade on that highway in Metro Manila. It is about a different kind of revolution, the kind that involved the masses in the countryside. It is about the crisis faced by peasants and laborers, the general population unseen and unrecorded. Misunderstood and easily misquoted, the people up on the hills, in the forests or blending with their sympathizers are the great outsiders. No media can reach them except documentaries that are immersive and participatory.
Herein lies the most exciting part of the documentary: Does Nettie Wild condone or condemn the movement? Is she a sympathizer? Is she one of them?
Here is the good part of the experience. The fact that a documentary was made in those days spoke of the greater ease with which these filmmakers were able to enter towns and villages and made their way into the camps of the New People’s Army.
Will a documentarian be able to do that now in the present administration?
According to Wild, there were many things that the mainstream media did not cover in those days. One goes back to the social history of the period and would remember what the Cory Administration called the “democratic space.”
The film tracks the lives of Kumander Dante, founder of the New People’s Army, and Fr. Ed de la Torre, a radical priest. We meet also in this work Fr. Frank Navarro, a priest who works among the “rebels;” Jun Pala, a radio announcer who serves as the voice of the growing “anti-communist crusade” in Davao; and a young lieutenant, Ronald de la Rosa, the same man who is now a senator.
There is nostalgia seeing Burgos, Tadeo, Nelia Sancho and other luminaries of the labor and workers’ front running for the senate. These were personalities who worked for the masses and who knew the struggle that mainstream society then and now could only question.
Then there are the footages of young women who are part of the revolutionary court deciding on the fate of a young man whose treachery against the movement merits him a death sentence. There is no hysteria in that scene, only this detached assessment of case. There is also no sentimentality when one dies quickly in the forest.
Where did our memory go? Here we see the footage of Cory Aquino flying out to Davao to express an official support to Alsa Masa, one of the vigilante groups supported by the government then trying to stop the rise of “communism.”
“Better late than never” is a strange phrase to use in a documentary, but this is exactly the feeling one gets from this homing report of years gone by. Is it late to get a sense of what we are in now after viewing this film? The film vividly captures that age: Enrile is embraced by the new government and Ramos becomes the poster boy of the “new democracy.” In those turn of events can be explained the fate of the nation whose leaders ignored the signs and omen of what will be happening soon—the return of the dictator and his memories in the guise of a preserved corpse, the ascendancy of the right, the preparation of the horizon for the governments that will follow the unexplained revolution, the decay of what would have been the gilding of a nation.
There is poignancy in the narrative of this documentary that still resonates now—how a nation can ignore the rustling of the leaves, its big men and women opting always for the comfort of the status quo and the assurance of a monolithic and monumental sense of class identity.
It is the irony of the People Power Revolution that after some years, the “People” were banished and only the “Power” has been retained.
A sense of the tragic and the triumphant attended the screening of The Rustling of the Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution on the day observing the declaration of Martial Law so that we would not forget the Martial Law years. The film, which won the People’s Choice Award at the 1989 Berlin International Film Festival and given the Prix du Public award on the 50th anniversary of the National Film Board of Canada, is a tribute to truth as Daang Dokyu opens its celebration of the arts of documentary and the realness of veritas.
A Rustling of Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution
will have a re-run from October 9 to 15 as part of Daang Dokyu’s festival proper. The documentary
was produced in association with the UK’s Channel 4 with the participation of Telefilm Canada, and
with the further assistance from the National Film Board of Canada and the Canada Council (Media
Arts and Explorations Program.) Music is provided by Joey Ayala, The Hotdogs, Salvador Ferreras, Rob Porter, David Byrne and the Talking Heads, and the Bee Gees.