DIABLO (2012, 1h 54m)
Written & Directed by Mes de Guzman
Starring: Ama Quiambao, Carlo Aquino, Arnold Reyes, Roeder Camañag, Althea Vega, Ronald Carranza, John Paul Escobedo, Edelyn Laguit, Freddie de La Cruz, Jose Escobedo
Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU and Espacio de Culturas are pleased to present Mes de Guzman’s award-winning film Diablo, as part of the Visions/Panawin film series. A talkback with Diablo actress Althea Vega will follow after the film screening.
Date: Friday, November 1, at 7:00 pm
Venue: NYU Espacio de Culturas | 53 Washington Sq S, NYC 10012
RSVP Link: https://bit.ly/panawin-f24
Free and open to the public, registration is required.
Synopsis
Nana Lusing works and lives by herself in a rural town and she looks forward to occasional visits by one or the other of her five grown sons. At night, she lies on her bed sleepless as she sees a dark figure looming in her room. Is this the devil? Her late husband? A manifestation of her anxieties or imagination? As the story unravels, values of unity, love, and family arise.
Director’s Notes
Diablo is a simple film with a simple structure. It is simply about a mother and her five sons. But the aim is not simplistic in style and vision.
Nana Lusing, the main character, is a representation of the typical Filipina mother of perpetual help – caring and loving to a fault, gentle and generous, passive and pious. In spite of her frailty and her sons’ failures, she remains strong and steadfast, never ceasing to listen to their endless woes as well as wonders. She is always there for them to offer comfort in every crisis. This virtuous image runs parallel to the persona of Mary, the mother of Christ.
Creating Diablo is my way of showing the incessant dire effects of a history of colonization and Christianization on the present Philippine generation. For too many centuries, we Filipinos have been taught the sublimity of suffering and passivity, making us predisposed to these values without learning to cultivate our own God-given creativity and powers of choice. Consequentially, we have peddled a dubious message of belonging(ness) that is marinated in religious rhetoric, motivating people to commit the atrocities of self-denial and surrender of self-determination.
This film is essentially not against religion; nor is it an arbitrary attack on the Catholic Church. Much less is it for the promotion of the diabolic. It fundamentally desires to put things in perspective as far as faith and its role in the survival of simple folk are concerned. It is meant to raise awareness of the issue and the true meaning of the moral tenets we believe in and their real-life impact on us.
About Althea Vega (ANGELA)
Althea Vega is a New York-based film, TV, and theater actress. She has appeared in films by other prominent Philippine directors, including Joel Lamangan (No Way Out, I Love Dreamguyz), Gil Portes (Two Funerals, Bayang Magiliw), Aloy Adlawan (Ang Katiwala), and Khavn de la Cruz’s Balanggiga: Howling Wilderness, Urian Best Picture winner. She was lead actress in British director Sean Ellis’ film Metro Manila, which won the World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and Best Film at the British Independent Film Awards.
Vega is a physical health advocate and holds an international personal trainer certification from the National Academy of Sports Medicine. As a fitness competitor, she has won Ms. Gold’s Gym Staff Philippines and represented the Philippines at the Fitness Universe in Miami. In 2024, she won the Directors Choice Award at Swimsuit USA International.
Curator’s Notes
Diablo is a fruit of the Cinemalaya system that has helped usher in the new wave of independent filmmaking in the Philippines. Cinemalaya, which held its first annual film festival exactly 20 years ago, sends out a call for screenplays to filmmakers in the Philippines and the diaspora, professional and aspiring. A painstaking process results in ten full-length feature finalists that Cinemalaya endows with seed money. The system also provides training and workshops for the chosen filmmakers, with particular attention to novices.
With the seed money and the reputation of Cinemalaya, filmmakers are able to go around and find independent funders and producers. The film festival, held in August each year, is one of the most highly anticipated events in the Philippine cultural calendar, attracting scouts from a number of international film fests and institutions. Though Cinemalaya has had its financial ups and downs and inevitable harvest of finalists missing the mark, it has gained such success and reputation that other independent festivals employing similar systems have sprouted in the country, the most long-lasting being the QCinema, Cinema One, and Sinag Maynila film festivals, further providing venues and opportunities to indie filmmakers, some of them plucked from obscurity.
The dominant mainstream film industry could very occasionally come up with arthouse films of international calibre, e.g. some works by Peque Gallaga or Erik Matti (whose On the Job 2 nabbed Best Actor at the 2021 Venice Film Festival and was acquired by HBO Max). However much of mainstream production hew to tried and tired genre formulas of the romcom, action, melodrama and fantasy variety. Films that would be considered by mainstream studios as too cutting-edge or intellectually challenging for the masses have found their chances in Cinemalaya and its sister festivals. Mainstream actors (like Carlo Aquino, Arnold Reyes, and Althea Vega in the case of Diablo) would often work for nominal fees in these indie films, sensing that their artistic redemptions lie in these fresh and original endeavors rather than the hackneyed genre or teleserye roles they usually have to lug around in order to pay the bills.
In a 100-plus year-old film industry that was until the early aughts overwhelmingly Manila- and Tagalog-centric, the Cinemalaya system – along with the digital revolution and consequent democratization of filmmaking – has engendered a burst of regional cinema presented in local languages. Such is the case with Diablo, set in writer/director Mes de Guzman’s native Nueva Vizcaya region and performed in its Ilocano patois.
Diablo, with its enigmatic story and spare, contemplative style provides a peek into the thematically and stylistically adventurous nature of the vanguard of contemporary indie Philippine cinema. The film starts with an exorcism in a mining cavern. Then it abruptly cuts to a quotidian scene in the life of an elderly woman, Nana Lusing (Ama Quiambao). Afterward, the film never follows up or directly refers back to the exorcism. (It’s only in retrospect that one may realize why such a scene would be the film’s opener.)
Lusing is a stoic woman who lives alone in a stone house that has seen better days. At night, a black figure stands outside her mosquito net, keeping her awake. She finds solace in listening to a religious radio broadcast that warns of devils in disguise and in going to mass at the nearby stone church every morning.
We meet Lusing’s sons by turns, in the process getting acquainted with a cross-section of Philippine rural society. First is Ruben (Arnold Reyes) whom Lusing tries to visit on the farm that he tends but who, for an as yet undisclosed reason, refuses to see his mother, pressing his wife Ima (Edelyn Laguit) to lie about his whereabouts. Then there’s Fernando (Freddie dela Cruz), a soldier who comes for a visit and tells her about battles with anti-government rebels in the mountains. The miner Ronaldo (Jose Escobedo) is too busy to visit but promises to keep checking up on her via his cell phone, at least when the unreliable signal works.
A son with the most unusual occupation, Oscar (Carlo Aquino) has a tendency to visit Lusing at the most unexpected times and silently gain entry into the house through windows instead of doors. He’s an ascetic seeker of enlightenment who has attracted a barefoot band of cult followers carrying gas lamps like him. Then there’s Alberto (Roeder Camañag), the family’s black sheep and charmer – and apparently Lusing’s favorite — who comes with his dour city girlfriend (Althea Vega), scheming to extract as much money as he could from the visit.
As with many families that have fragmented due to the demands and locations of work, it’s only a death that brings them together. It’s also only then that their buried family tensions burst into the open.
In de Guzman’s Director’s Statement, he cites as a thematic impulse the insidious passivity that Christianization and colonization have wreaked on the nation’s cultural consciousness and character. In this light, the unexplained exorcism at the film’s beginning could be a preview of the rest of the film, if seen as an exorcism of Lusing’s passivity and over-reliance on religion. The scene also sets the tone for an atmosphere replete with religious images, cult gatherings, Lenten rituals, hints of the devil, and even a humorous touch of magic realism.
De Guzman’s artistic sensibility is too subtle for the film to be nothing more than an indictment. In the hushed ways that it layers nuance upon nuance, the film ends up addressing and resonating with existential anxieties and fears experienced universally. Where is the devil and its shape-shifting manifestations? Does it hide in mines under the earth or is it nearer us, right in the caverns of the human heart?
About the Director
Ramon “Mes” de Guzman (b. 1971) commenced his artistic journey as a writer in the 1990s when he won four Palanca awards (the “Philippine Pulitzers”) for entries in the teleplay division. His 2004 novel, Rancho Dyanggo, received the Grand Prize from the NCCA (National Commission for Culture and the Arts). He has also published a book of short stories, Barriotic Punk.
He first tried his hand at film production with the short Batang Trapo/Rag Kids (2002), which won the Urian and Marrakech International Film Festival awards for Best Short Film. His first feature-length film, Ang Daan Patungong Kalimugtong/The Road to Kalimugtong was recognized with a number of Philippine and international awards, including Urian Best Director and Best New Director at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. His subsequent films, including the “Earth” trilogy, Diablo, The Story of Mabuti, and Sitio, have garnered several more awards in the Philippines and appeared at festivals and retrospectives in Spain, the Netherlands, France, Australia, and the United States.
He’s currently in pre-production for his latest film, Sepak Takraw, titled after the team sport of this name. His wife Rhea Operaña de Guzman has worked as a line producer of his last six films. Filmmaker Lav Diaz is their marriage godfather. When not shooting films, they live in a remote barrio in the Nueva Vizcaya mountain region where Diablo and a number of their other films are situated.
– Gil Quito
Curator
Awards for Diablo
- Gawad Urian: Best Screenplay
- Cinemalaya: Best Picture, Director, Actress (Ama Quiambao), Cinematography; NETPAC Award