Back to the classics

MANILA, Philippines - I-Witness has become the face of TV documentaries for the past 10 years. It treats the viewer not just as a passive witness but as someone who can dig up the issue and contemplate on it. This time around, the GMA 7 show returns to its roots in presenting and dissecting Juan dela Cruz’s affairs. The improved I-Witness will be seen starting tomorrow, March 8 after Saksi.

“It started last year,” offers documentarist Howie Severino. “We’re doing a more classic approach to docu. The common (observation) about I-Witness is the short (limited) time spent on the production. There’s a saying in docu that time is truth. So what kind of truth will you get in two weeks?”

As Howie puts it, classic documentary is “following a subject over time. That’s where you see the evolution or the process of change of a subject. It doesn’t have to be a person. It can be a situation, a place or a country.”

If my memory serves me right, Howie and his team have shown this by doing a story on Transpinay, gay Filipino men who considered to undergo a sex change or to live a transvestite lifestyle. I-Witness followed prospective subjects and documented the mental, emotional, psychological and physical struggles they went through. Along with these were sub-stories on triumph and defeat. Another interesting docu was about a Filipino veteran’s life in the US. Howie followed this up for 10 years — including the time the veteran fulfilled the American Dream for himself and his family and returned to Manila. Howie reunited with his pal who was also an Ondoy victim. It reminds one of Bienvenido Santos’ short stories set in foreign land like The Day The Dancers Came.

There’s the Iraq docu in which Howie showed the dramatic contrast of life before and after the war. All of them are compelling on camera.

What the viewers have seen in 2009 are a preview of where the I-Witness think tank wants to bring the genre.

“It is more than a show,” says Howie of I-Witness. “It is an extension of the cinematic genre. There’s fiction which is most of Hollywood. Non-fiction is docu. We are a show but the people who have been part of it feel it is a form of cinema.”

That’s why you can watch the documentaries on DVD and in the convenience and comfort of a local theater. I-Witness has also reached out to students to prove that everyone can be a documentarist, and that looking at things from a docu’s viewpoint can help see things differently. Here, you see how the docu has beeen democratized.

For the show’s premiere, Sandra Aguinaldo puts a WWII survivor on the hot seat as he recalls how sharks ate his wounded comrades. Kara David, on the other hand, joins a search for buried treasures. Jay Taruc goes behind bars to document the life of an inmate. Howie locates the whereabouts of the young woman he met during a martial law rally after the police took her away. 

Howie also shares that no matter how they try to be objective with the handling of the subject, documentarists can’t help but sometimes be carried away, especially if the story is heartbreaking. This is why some scenes didn’t make it to the final cut.

The past years have seen I-Witness providing alternative viewing on TV. It has proven that Filipinos can sit through a non-fiction program for a good 30 minutes. This, in itself, is a success story worth telling.