A Philippino Movie by Sherad Anthony Sanchez

(video by AsianVirusnet)

It was a choice between saving a life and their culture. A boy was dying in the arms of his grandmother. She decided to take the boy to the doctors. Only the hospital was in town, and a war had just taken place between the marauders from the town and the tribe. The tribe was fighting to preserve its beliefs, its civilizational heritage. So the villagers decided to kill the grandmother and the boy. Tradition and Modernity in collision; two great artists come to my mind: Parajanov made ballades about ancestral cultures, suggesting their pathos; Satyajit Ray meditated in his movies about Cosmos versus History.

This movie seems to be on the side of the Modernity in the conflict with Tradition: Huling Balyan ng buhi - O ang Sinalirap nga asoy nila - the title in Tagalog, one of the three official languages in the Philippines.

The English translation is The Last Priestess of Buhi: The Woven Stories of the Other. A Philippino movie made by Sherad Anthony Sanchez, on the border between documentary and fiction. It is taking place among Communist rebels: the movie keeps the strong political undertones, but the story is gradually metamorphosing in visual poetry. Says AsianVirusNet, time and space disintegrate in discrete psychological suggestions and in pictures of wonderful marshes and picturesque mountain landscapes.

(video by AsianVirusNet)

(Filipino Cinema)