In this country, Jonas Burgos is perhaps the most well known of the desaparecidos: the victims of enforced disappearances perpetrated by state forces. Ever since he was abducted in 2007, Burgos has not resurfaced, despite a supreme court resolution that holds both the armed forces and the police accountable for his disappearance. His story was dramatized by Joel Lamangan in 2013 into a feature film, Burgos, starring Lorna Tolentino.
Alipato at Muog (Embers and a Fortress) is a documentary delving into Burgos' case and his family's search for the truth, while also showing that Jonas Burgos' case is not unique: thousands of Filipinos have disappeared since the time of Martial Law, and many still vanish to this day. At the same time, it's a personal story, as the film's director, JL Burgos, is Jonas' brother.
"A tomb is the beginning of justice," JL notes near the end of the film. There is something deeply tragic about someone who just vanishes without a trace - in the space where that person once was, grief cannot easily fill it; in that uncertainty, there is little room to mourn. The truth and the search for justice are both forms of closure not just for the person who is gone, but also those he leaves behind. In the film's final moments, in front of a crackling fire, JL and his family show that the best response to the lack of closure is to live a normal and fulfilling life, to never forget, to keep the embers of a man burning for as long as memory allows, to honor a man who gave and gave and gave parts of himself until, in the end, there was nothing at all.
An immediate peculiarity upon watching Dominic Bekaert's An Errand: DP Steven Evangelio frames the film's protagonist, Moroy (Sid Lucero) inside side mirrors and reflective surfaces, as he eavesdrops and listens in to the conversations of people who ride in his car. It's as if we are in the car, listening in with him... or looking back at him listening to us. It is a strange kind of intimacy: one whose obtuseness creates emotional distance despite being physically immediate. At times, the camera slowly zooms into his face, as if to search for meaning that isn't quite there.
The central conceit of An Errand is a mundane, if absurd, task: deliver a gaudy t-shirt and a tin of viagra via a roundtrip from Manila to Baguio. The titular errand itself doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, as it is merely used to frame its central character's deeply personal search for meaning.
Its treatment eschews many conventions of narrative, the finished film more like a tone poem that evokes a mood rather than a story that brings us from A to B. If you're not in the mood, it's not going to work as well as it should. But to me, the film's (alleged) abstruseness is a feature and not a bug.
Moroy is living a life as fake as the watch he sports: one modeled after his boss, his idylls filled with fantasies of a life that is not his. When he tries to say that he and his boss aren't so different and gives a justification of his relatively humdrum life to his boss mistress (Elora Españo), she points out the artifice in his words.
One thing that occupies most of the goings-on of drivers like Moroy is waiting: seemingly endless stretches of time in stasis, in strange, unfamiliar places, or in transit to them, silently, in a vehicle. His journeys are rarely ones he takes for himself. Moroy's eventual emotional journey is one that tries to find itself out of homeostasis, to take a detour, if not a completely different path.
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