Nor Domingo – Windows on Worlds

“Not all women want to be mothers” according to the heroine of Anna Isabelle Matutina’s 12 Weeks, yet this is apparently largely what society expects of them. Faced with an unexpected pregnancy at 40, Alice decides on abortion though it is technically illegal in the fiercely Catholic Philippines and she finds herself having to offer justification for her choices while trying to process her complicated relationship with her own mother who often tells her that she too wanted an abortion but obviously did not go through with it and left shortly after Alice was born to become a domestic worker in Hong Kong.

The irony is that Alice (Max Eigenmann) works for an NGO supporting people displaced by natural disaster or civil unrest but is to an extent displaced herself in her estrangement from her mother, Grace (Bing Pimentel). In a poignant moment after having been made aware of the pregnancy by Alice’s violet ex Ben (Vance Larena), Grace brings out a box of baby clothes that once belonged to Alice only she never got to wear them because her grandmother who was raising her told Grace not to send anything but money because she had no way of knowing what size her daughter was. Grace is excited about the prospect of becoming a grandmother because it gives her a second chance at the motherhood she was denied by economic circumstance especially as the implication is she could play a larger role in their upbringing while Alice continues with her career.

But even considering the strained relationship between them, Grace is far from supportive more or less taking over booking doctor’s appointments on her daughter’s behalf without really consulting her. Aside from the awkwardness and upset of the situation, Alice cannot discuss the abortion with her mother because of its illegality and the risks it might cause to herself and those otherwise involved in it. To be able to access an abortion safely, she has to undergo a counselling session and is then told that her operation will take place at 11pm hinting at its illicitness that it must take place under cover of darkness. The counsellor is sympathetic and clear that she isn’t trying to change her mind even if some of the questions seem invasive or patriarchal. Asking if Alice has been subject to domestic violence she offers help making sure that she’s not being pressured into an abortion she might not want by violent partner or the necessity of escaping them.

Ben is indeed violent and it’s a fact that if she changes her mind and keeps the baby it will become much more difficult to keep him out of her life. Slightly younger than she is, he is moody and insecure while financially supported by Alice and living in a home she owns. He is not a responsible person with whom to raise a child though places extreme pressure on her to have the baby and manipulatively leaks the pregnancy news to Grace knowing she’ll do the same. Alice discovers that in reality everyone else is making her decisions for her, including a colleague who suddenly cancels a trip she was supposed to make to a disaster area on the grounds that his own wife has recently had a miscarriage and in his opinion it’s not safe for her to go.

Set during the imposition of martial law on Mindanao in 2017, the film implies that a kind of martial law already exists for women who are unable to make their own decisions about their reproductive health or exercise their own autonomy. Alice is repeatedly told that she should have the baby because she is already 40 and the chance won’t come again though little thought is given to whether she wanted the chance or not while her own thoughts surrounding motherhood are clouded by the relationship she has with Grace which was largely affected by the economic realities that forced her to become a migrant worker. In part she rejects becoming a mother out of anxiety worrying that she is not suited to it, but is also conflicted in its inextricable ties to Ben and with wider patriarchal violence in general depriving her of the ability to choose from all angles. In the end a choice is made for her in the cruellest of ways leaving her more or less powerless with only the small comfort of female solidarity.

12 Weeks screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

“Respect” is a thorny issue, is it something which is conferred from a position of inferiority, an acceptance of equality, or taken by force? Should the older generation be “entitled” to the respect of the young simply for having been born earlier, lived longer, and have less time left, and should the state also be “entitled” to the respect of its citizens even if it abuses that respect? Respeto is the debut feature from Alberto (Treb) Monteras II but like much Philippine cinema it comes with heavy baggage as its scrappy youngster attempts to come of age in the hip hop dens of the Pandacan slums where all around him the increasingly oppressive Duterte regime brings back terrible memories for a generation only once removed from his own which paid a heavy price to rid themselves of a tyranny they now see returning.

Hendrix (Abra), a scrappy teen living with his older sister and her boyfriend who prides himself for his magnanimity in supporting his lover’s annoying kid brother, says he has the “mind of a gangster” and longs to prove himself in the underground rap battling world which represents a kind of escape from the harshness of his everyday existence. Hip hop maybe the music of the oppressed, but there’s little politicking in arcane world of petty gangsters and drugged up thugs. This is a world of humiliation – the rappers rap about rapping, about how their rhymes are sweeter than their opponent’s, how their opponent is weak and they are strong. Despite an often careful honing of a craft, this rap is vacuous – a misuse of words that could serve real purpose to do little more than replace the act of physical violence with macho male posturing.

This is certainly a very male, macho world. Inducted into the rap battle scene, Hendrix is tricked into battling an old veteran, Jambalaya – a larger lady with an intimidating presence, but all he can come up with is a steady stream of misogynistic fat jokes, badly delivered, before he wets himself live on stage. Jambalaya quite rightly destroys him with an elegantly delivered takedown which subtly suggests everything he’s just said is completely beneath him and is therefore doubly insulting. Hendrix is humiliated, as the loser of the battles is intended to be, but he’s slow to realise that the game itself is already a betrayal of its own power.

Having stolen the money to participate in the rap battle from Mondo (Brian Arda), his sister’s dodgy boyfriend, Hendrix hits on an extreme solution to pay him back – robbing the secondhand bookshop run by an old man, Doc (Dido De La Paz), seemingly suffering with the early stages of dementia. The plan fails because Hendrix and his buddies aren’t exactly master criminals, but as a result they find themselves tasked with having to repair the damage while Doc, mildly outraged by the youth of the day, begins to see enough potential in the obviously bright yet stubborn young man to want to try to save him.

What occurs between them is somewhere between a war of words and a war for words. Doc, now an old man, was an activist poet during the Marcos regime who lost a wife and child to its brutality. In the end, his words were not enough but unlike those of the rap battlers of Pandacan, they were both beautiful and filled with purpose. Doc’s verses were, in a sense, intended to humiliate a regime – in this they are not so different from Hendrix’s rhymes, but they failed to take the place of violence. A man of words faced with the possibility of revenge, Doc was not strong enough to resist but bought himself only more anguish in a single act of primal rage that soon forged another link in a chain stretching out in both directions across an eternity.

Peppered throughout, radio broadcasts make frequent reference to a debate surrounding the long delayed burial of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos who died in exile in 1989. The older generation fought an oppressive regime and thought they’d won only for their children to betray the revolution they gave birth to – literally in Doc’s case as his son became a corrupt policeman who abuses his power to humiliate those whose should “respect” he ought to earn through continued service. Rendered powerless by their oppressive environments, both Doc and Hendrix sought to reclaim their self respect by asserting their voice, but in the end their words find only empty air. Somehow awed by ancient technology, the kids find an old record of a Marcos era protest song in Doc’s bookshop and realise they already know the words. The singer, seemingly a young person, begs to be left out the political storm, not to be dragged into a war he sees as nothing to do with him, but an escape from this unending cycle of violence seems unlikely while words remain weightless.

Available to stream online via Festival Scope until 20th February 2018 as part of its International Film Festival Rotterdam tie-up.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Tag: Nor Domingo

12 Weeks (Anna Isabelle Matutina, 2022)

Respeto (Alberto Monteras II, 2017)