'Dito sa lupang hinarang'

Ditsi Carolino’s latest political documentary Lupang Hinarang is by the director’s own admission a work in progress, and she has chosen to show the roughly 90-minute film in the school circuit to explore a “window of opportunity” as lawmakers try to cobble together a reformed Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Bill before the CARP law’s second extension lapses by the end of June this year.

Coming more than three years after her last documentary Bunso, which also helped greatly the passage of the Juvenile Justice Bill, Lupang Hinarang hopes to achieve no less in gathering momentum for similar landmark legislation, the CARPER bill.

For Carolino as filmmaker, the line between art and advocacy has always been blurred, and this, her latest work on the plight of farmers of Sumilao and Negros, shows her usual strengths: she lets the handheld camera do the storytelling, patiently focusing on the sunburnt faces during the thousand-kilometer-long march from Bukidnon to Manila, and on the phases of emaciation during an almost month-long hunger strike outside the Department of Agrarian Reform offices in Quezon City.

There are actually two stories here, as the director herself pointed out before a screening at the Fajardo auditorium in Brother Andrew Gonzalez Hall in La Salle Taft, where the overzealous security guards gave us an unwitting preview of what was to come, that is, in terms of almost not letting us in, hinarang ang manonood.

But thanks to the sponsor COSCA, and to Ditsi herself, those initially blocked by security were finally let in to watch and be educated on the dialectics of agrarian reform, and how such things are never as simple as they seem.

The first, shorter story has to do with the Sumilao farmers’ march to Manila, including different anecdotes along the hard road and the walk for long-promised land tilled by generations before them. The camera as expected captures the earthy tones of the countryside, as well as close-ups of callused feet, and of one marcher relating in Cebuano how she would not change slippers until she reaches the capital, not only to be cost-efficient but as proof that land rightfully theirs can be claimed with a single pair of hardy slippers.

There is enough contained drama and humor here among the farmers, including the shearing of hair outside the San Miguel offices in Mandaluyong, the company having bought the land from the supposedly original owner in order to set up a piggery in the 144-hectare property in Sumilao.

Room enough too for an appropriate catharsis as in the case of Ka Hilda who cannot help but weep in exultation after the Palace overturns its earlier order effectively declaring the property in Bukidnon as agricultural land, thus making it eligible for land reform, and the elderly woman repeatedly saying “144! 144!” as if the number were a winning lotto combination.

Bayang Barrios and Sammy Asuncion provide the soundtrack in part one, through the journey over land and water, and back to the province aboard an Air Force plane. Ditsi holds the camera herself most of the time, as her erstwhile collaborator Nana Buxani is for the moment missing in action, deciding to concentrate on her own photography projects.

Part two deals with the hunger strike of the farmers from Negros Occidental outside DAR offices, and the camera painstakingly details and chronicles their fast that lasts 28 odd days, until several of them are rushed to the emergency ward of East Avenue Medical Center.

The viewer cannot but admire the steadfastness and perseverance of the hunger strikers in their quest for land, and the lengths they go through to claim what’s theirs: when asked how they feel during the progress of the fast, one of them replies that he feels as if his insides are falling away, while another says it is as if he is going deaf. Another faster, a mom, relates how her child had told her it’s okay even if they have no land as long as she (the mom) is with them (the children).

There is footage of the strikers writing out their last will and testament, just in case, leaving whatever little they have such as earrings and other personal effects, to their siblings and other loved ones.

Those who have not seen the face of hunger or felt the pangs and ravages thereof, would get a semblance of it in Lupang Hinarang part two, the longer section at 60 minutes with soundtrack provided by Noel Cabangon singing “Wala pa ring lupa si Juan” over a reggae beat.

There are rare scenes too of the Negros farmers being shot at by the goons of one landowner who wants them off his land, even after the granting of an order returning to the farmers the right to till the disputed property. If this is not evidence of aggression admissible in court, it is certainly agit-prop at its best because it’s backed by a searing truth, and Ditsi credits the cameraman who happened to be at the scene at the time of the murders, Jojo Sescon.

The film is not above suggesting other possible villains, like Agrarian Secretary Pangandaman and presidential son and lawmaker Mikey Arroyo, who may not exactly be simpatico but still deserve their day in court. There’s a touch of bathos too when Etta Rosales comes to comfort the hunger strikers, she being a former street parliamentarian who has mastered the art of imitating her trapo colleagues in the air-conditioned hall of Congress.

Work in progress though it is, Lupang Hinarang succeeds both as documentary and advocacy tool, and we have little doubt that a CARPER bill will be passed thanks in part to the sacrifice of the farmers and Ditsi’s film.

It is just a little ironic that some of those who applauded at film’s end in the campuses where it’s been shown may have paid part of their expensive tuition through arable lands that the farmers would soon be claiming. But just as easily could part of the audience be comprised of students who themselves may have benefited from the initial phase of the CARP. What goes around comes around in the never-ending, tricky dialectics, which, however, remains subservient to the visual art of filmmaking.