Watching Gutierrez Mangansakan II's latest film, Masla A Papanok, reminded me of his earlier film, Qiyamah, in that both films involve an apocalypse. While the earlier film's apocalypse is much more literal, this one involves the ending of something quite different: the destruction of cultures, kingdoms, and memory.
The film takes place in the 1890's, during a period of transition from Spanish to American hegemony. Bai Intan, a princess, is taken in by a convent and converted into Christianity. She has difficulty acclimating to the new environment and culture, but eventually settles in. There is an attack at the convent, then a retaliation for that attack. A mythical bird, a harbinger of doom, signals the start of bad things to come.
The film shifts between the perspectives of the tribe and the Spaniards, switching from monochrome to desaturated color, like in a colorized photograph. The filmmaking style also seems to shift: from something from the early days of cinema to something that feels a little more modern. But the color soon fades into night, as entire cultures are wiped away by colonial ambitions. They remain in fragments and fever-dreams in the mind of Bai Intan, years later, the last vestiges of her cultural memory. And like her country and her people, she has been irrevocably changed by the experience. The papanok ("bird" in Maguindanaon vernacular) fortells this tragedy, yet it reappears in modern times, perhaps signifying a continual destruction of cultures, or something even darker.
The film takes it slow, even at a leisurely 85 minutes, and it's dense with meaning. Though I'm not totally convinced with some of the aspects of its presentation, Masla A Papanok is a film worth poring over.
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