BY MARY KAREEN GANCIO, West Visayas State University
“SA TAGUANGKAN SANG DUTA” is a story of Elena and Andoy, a young couple struggling to conceive as they deal with the threat of poor harvest.
Drained by her unfulfilling job in the city, Elena decides to retreat into their countryside home where her husband awaits. This much needed break offers the couple the opportunity to bear a child delayed by her choice to work away from him. Their land appears to share their fate as it also fails to be productive.
However, determined to overcome these challenges, the couple wittingly employs a traditional practice that enables their successful pregnancy and eventual good harvest.
An adaptation of Alice Tan-Gonzales’ 2003 short story of the same title, Emmanuel Lerona’s 2024 film celebrates the rural life’s simplicity and ordinariness while also calling attention to the complex negotiations that its inhabitants go through.
What is most observable in the film is its collection of images that effectively captures and communicates the universe of the characters that is further enabled by the actors’ convincing performance. It is easy to imagine the couple as a teacher and a farmer with the backstory as young lovers growing in the countryside, but must have been exposed to the city and its urban practices such as body inking, dental corrections, and ear piercings.
However, notable portions of the film can be considered questionable. The montage that appears as a dream sequence right before the wife roused her husband to sow seeds in the middle of the night can be read as bordering between a depiction of the wife’s anxiety and a totally random series of images irrelevant to the story.
While the actors’ commitment to the roles from sowing the seeds into the rice field naked up until the climax of the couple’s lovemaking was laudable, the sex scene could have been maintained as suggestive. Perhaps it was the montage that accompanied this scene that was nagging.
The scene when the carabao escaped and the husband had to leave the house to find it was also confusing. There must have been a missing scene that could have helped make sense of this portion of the film.
Significantly, the film managed to visualize the juxtaposition between the couple’s determination to fulfill their roles by bearing a child and to ensure the productivity of their land. This was generally aided by the dialogues delivered against the backdrop of the forest or with the elements of the crops literally at hand.
It also visualized a notable and relatively familiar dynamic that is difficult to ignore — the wife calling the shots most of the time. As a film (story) that employs terms that mainly suggest female elements in its title, it made sure that it communicates the complex, even ironic situations, that women find themselves in in this society. While often burdened by the myth of motherhood, they can be empowered as key participant in ensuring humanity’s survival in various sorts of ways. Although the film ended with a seemingly single conclusion to Elena’s fate — a mother and a wife in the rural space, the wit and grit she demonstrated in the film speak of a multitude of possibilities that she can actively decide for herself and her family.
Finally, it is also important to recognize how this film does what films do best, serving as a time capsule. The short story has already served this function when Tan-Gonzales captured this reality in her writing. By turning it into a film, Lerona has enabled the extension of the narrative’s reach as it cuts across generations, as well as category of audiences — the viewers. This film is another manifestation of the attempt to claim a space in this universe of narratives, which up until today remains to be a struggle for region-based storytellers./PN
MARY KAREEN GANCIO is a faculty of West Visayas State University College of Communication – Broadcasting Division. Her advocacies include the integration of cinema and film production in education and the promotion of the culture of film archiving in Iloilo. She earned her Master of Arts in Media Studies degree, major in Film, from UP Film Institute at UP Diliman, Quezon City. She is currently completing her degree in PhD Media Studies from the same institution.
Kareen is doing research about the Audiovisual Archiving Practices of Broadcasting Companies in Iloilo City and on Establishing a community-based Film Archiving in Iloilo. Her other interests include College-based Audiovisual Archiving, Film Archiving, Philippine Regional Cinema, and Film and Multimedia for Basic Education. Kareen has been a Freelance Public Speaking Trainer since 1998 and an Aikido Instructor from 2014 up to the present.
