PPP 2020: The Highest Peak

 

David (Dax Alejandro) wants to climb Mount Apo, the highest peak in the Philippines, after the death of his wife and son. To do so, he needs a porter - and after fate gives him an unlikely choice, he sets out on a personal journey that takes him into interesting paths.

The mountain trek as personal journey narrative has been explored before in local cinema in films such as Pepe Diokno's Above the Clouds (2014), but usually in these narratives, the climbers are usually outsiders. While that holds true in The Highest Peak, we are also told the perspective of the people living around and in the mountain itself.

It's clear that David is more involved with Mount Apo than it first seems - he was once part of a mining company that planned to take advantage of the mountain's resources to the detriment of its Lumad population. In a way, this journey is not only one of healing, but redemption. As he makes his way up, he gains firsthand knowledge of the lives of the people he was about to ruin. While that happens, Apo itself becomes a character, its occasional earthquakes almost like signals of discontent.

That said, everything I just mentioned works in theory, but the execution is lacking. While this film is a step up from earlier efforts such as Tu Pug Imatuy (2017) and Kaaway sa Sulod (2019), a lot of details are lost thanks to an edit that doesn't bring all these concepts together. For example, had I not known the synopsis of the film first hand, I'd have thought that Mara Lopez's character was David's wife instead of someone else, and certain flashback scenes don't feel like flashbacks, making the film slightly difficult to parse.

And once David has reached the peak, with all the standard melodramatic bells and whistles, what then? He joins the people of the mountain, he partakes in their struggles. All admirable things, of course, but the threat of large corporations is still there, and they won't go away. I'm personally torn whether that storytelling decision is justified or not. While Barbarona does touch upon the different ways the mountain is exploited by capitalists and corporations, what about the local efforts of the government to stop and prevent (or, in some cases, facilitate) that exploitation? What are the other effects of this exploitation towards the Lumad communities?  While, to be fair, the film does depict some of this, it's only during the last 10 minutes or so when this happens. The picture the film paints feels incomplete.

That said, while heavily flawed, there were some parts to The Highest Peak that I enjoyed, and hopefully Barbarona and company get to refine their filmmaking skills even more with future projects.