‘Alipato at Muog’ review: Why the film demands to be seen by the public

There’s no denying the attention that Alipato at Muog, the latest documentary by JL Burgos, has invited from a sizable fraction of the moviegoing public because of the circumstances that orbit the film, which now faces a public viewing ban, after it received an X rating from the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) for it apparently “tends to undermine the faith and confidence of the people in their government.”

The decision comes days before the International Day of the Disappeared, and after the film’s run at this year’s Cinemalaya Film Festival – an edition so fraught and turbulent it might require some reconfiguration.

Consider: the canceled premiere of Bryan Brazil’s Lost Sabungeros – about the cockfighters that have gone missing since 2022 – due to “security concerns” and the alleged screening sabotage of Seán Devlin’s docudrama Asog, which exposes the involvement of Ayala Land, the festival host, in the displacement of the residents of Sicogon Island in northern Iloilo.

Another title that had its Philippine premiere at Cinemalaya, Ramona Diaz’s And So It Begins, about Leni Robredo’s grassroots electoral campaign, is also out of major cinemas, despite its PG rating.

In an online petition, the Concerned Artists of the Philippines urged the MTRCB to rescind the X rating it handed the film, calling it “a blatant act of state censorship.” 

Following this, Burgos and executive producer Mona Nieva filed an appeal before the government agency for a second review of the documentary. It bears mentioning as well that this isn’t the first time the Board imposed a similar rating on a Cinemalaya Special Jury Prize winner, following Kip Oebanda’s Liway (2018), Ma-an Asuncion-Dagñalan’s Blue Room (2022), and Dustin Celestino’s Ang Duyan ng Magiting (2023).

Does this context, alongside the film’s topicality, warrant the work to be touted as important or essential as manic reviews tend to claim every now and then? For a host of reasons, yes, but the thing is, Alipato at Muog doesn’t demand for it to be showered with this particular distinction and have its merits heightened, precisely because it puts faith in its own vision and mode of articulation, because it can actually speak for itself.

The film, gathering 17 years worth of footage spiked with disorienting animation, maps the story’s provenance by returning to the Ever Gotesco mall in Quezon City, where activist Jonas Burgos, the director’s older sibling, was abducted by military personnel in 2007. From the site of the disappearance, the picture goes on to tell what has unraveled after the fact, as it jumps between timelines, tracks every possible lead, and sits across sources, hoping for clarity and closure.

The story is mounted with adrenaline and the brio of drama, one that boasts a different scale from Joel Lamangan’s 2013 feature film of the same motivation, Burgos, starring Lorna Tolentino. In this iteration, every frame is active and infused with an interval for reflection, particularly when the camera points its lens to the many inner lives interrupted by the lack of justice, and it’s integral to the plot because it is through this frame of mind that we see Jonas no longer existing in the realm of myth and statistics, no longer the “poster boy” for the desaparecidos in this sad republic.

We see Edita Burgos, the heart and soul of the film, speaking at different rallies and events and introducing herself as the mother of the disappeared Jonas many times over, a mother still in search of a child, of a body, alive or otherwise.

We see the wife of Jonas trying to recount her last moment with her husband. We see his daughter welcoming another birthday sans the embrace of a father. We see his friend going on record for the first time, wishing the activist had opted for the road most people would have taken.

We see the farmers he helped organize to reclaim the land they till. We see his brother still dealing with recurring nightmares of his abduction. We learn that Jonas is just as assertive as his father, press freedom icon Joe Burgos, who was incarcerated under the dictatorship of the elder Marcos.

The title succeeds and excavates a wealth of meaning in this respect alone, and all through this film we’re aware that the presence of these lives that find a cardinal point through Jonas not only intimates his image as the person who has gone missing for nearly two decades now but pulverizes significantly the absurd narratives spouted by state spin doctors against its dissenters.

Here, it is not impossible to picture the cause Jonas has valued and fought for, and how else can the state grapple with such assertion but through erasure?

Director JL Burgos, also known for the unjustly underseen Portraits of Mosquito Press (2015), displays the tendency to go inward; after all, it’s a reality he has lived and continues to live. The viewer cannot fault him for how he approaches the film, and the whole thing still works even if he remains there, yet he doesn’t remain there.

Burgos weighs the incidents perceptively; he refuses to leave the truth lying there inert or even open to interpretation. If anything, he banks on open defiance and moves past the individual, and towards the collective, and by harnessing vantage points, this is where the film exposes its harshest contentions and magnifies itself politically and cinematically.

The picture allows us to identify with its emotional trellis and broader pronouncements by presenting us damning evidence on the case, from media reportage to court rulings and telling paper trail, to expert interviews and testimonies, rendered more cuttingly by the frenetic editing.

It directs us to other cases of enforced disappearance, such as the 2006 abduction of University of the Philippines (UP) students Karen Empeno and Sherlyn Cadapan, for which retired major general Jovito Palparan, notoriously tagged as “The Butcher,” was found guilty of, as well as the recent case of environmental defenders Jonila Castro and Jhed Tamano, the pair who declared the state army abducted them in a press conference hosted by the alleged perpetrators themselves – a moment that is among the film’s peaks.

It is clear that Alipato at Muog is not afraid to point fingers at actual people and institutions and insists that Jonas’s case is not merely a result of coincidence, and what emerges from it are patterns of state violence and repressive systems that repeat regime after regime.

It’s no surprise that then-general Eduardo Año, revealed in the film as apparently responsible for Jonas’s disappearance, citing a Newsbreak investigative report, now heads the National Security Council, which was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying that the film “was a desperate attempt to revive an old case.”

Searing as the film is, there’s a context pivotal to its subject matter that it eschews, particularly the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo regime. The abduction of Jonas was under Arroyo’s watch, a controversial administration marked by human rights abuses, including the Ampatuan massacre, now considered as the deadliest attack on the press in the world, with 32 media workers killed.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the film entirely loses sight of its larger discussion, but it’s glaring that it overlooks this specific link, given that Arroyo commanded the military at the time.

Its emotional demarcation, however, is clear-cut, and it is aching to carry an ultra-awareness that, as the film exhibits, the people culpable for these crimes will most likely resume their lives, scot-free. It is difficult to think of a superlative that doesn’t feel vacuous to describe how each family barrels through the grief and its very shrapnels.

In many ways, Alipato at Muog is an admission as much as it is an incisive portrait of militancy – about the horrors of our ever-fickle justice system, about the punishing cruelty of history, and about how the powers that be are very much willing to go to epic lengths when they’re rattled by resistance.

But the film does not succumb to despair and cynicism. Solidarity recurs in it just as struggle does, for it is this strength that propels the bereaved forward, considering that the cases have not let up, it is this strength that gestures them toward a grand purpose.

When the documentary screened at the UP Film Center on August 24, JL Burgos was greeted by a packed theater, a testament of interest in the film and the larger dialogue it cracked open. It pushed through because UP is an autonomous institution.

But it doesn’t mean that the film should be denied access to a wider audience, to bigger cinemas. It pushed through because it had to, and it is this daring that towers over the film. What it ascertains is that, with or without the state ban, the truth it surfaces will be hard to put down. If anything, Alipato at Muog perseveres against the capture of the state’s imagination.

The declaration that the film is unfit for public viewing also facilitates and coincides with a particular conversation on the potentialities of Philippine cinema: a national cinema – yes, this thing that has been debated by critics, scholars, historians, film workers, and moviegoers time and again – will be impossible to attain in a country that refuses to foster a curious and critical audience.

Some spectators are of the opinion that films of this kind shouldn’t have existed, and it is an opinion I share, yet we have come to this juncture. Here is a work that is not made ex nihilo; it is an outcome of the material conditions it operates in. It is a work that pushes us to move beyond the entrapment of passive hope and towards concrete, purposeful action.

– Rappler.com

The UP Film Center holds screenings of Alipato at Muog on August 29 and 30.