2019 | 1h 25m | Directed by Alyx Ayn Arumpac
Synopsis
The election of Rodrigo Duterte as President of the Philippines sets in motion a culture of impunity resulting in the extrajudicial demise of suspected drug dealers, users, and small time street criminals, along with others caught in the crossfire. Aswang follows people whose lives get caught in the growing violence and protests.
Awards include: Int’l Documentary Filmfest Amsterdam: FIPRESCI Prize; Gawad Urian: Best Picture, Documentary, Direction, Cinematography; FAMAS Awards: Best Picture, Documentary, Cinematography, Editing; Montreal Int’l Documentary Filmfest: Grand Prize; DocAviv Filmfest: Beyond the Screen Best Picture; Thessaloniki Documentary Filmfest: Amnesty International Award; DMZ Int’l Documentary Filmfest: Grand Prize; MoMA Doc Fortnight selection; Philippine Young Critics Circle: Best First Feature
Availability window:
7pm, Apr 2 – 7pm, Apr 16
How to Watch
Click on the following link to access the film’s Eventive Page: Aswang. Once you arrive on the film’s Eventive page, click either “Pre-order” or “Buy” (don’t worry, you will be able to screen each film free of charge) and you will be prompted to enter an unlock code, which is (case sensitive):
Siglos*de*Anito*137a*z
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Curator’s Commentary
“When they say an Aswang is around, what they really mean is – be afraid” – Aswang
The film’s title refers to nighttime shape-shifting creatures, found in Philippine mythology, that revel in striking fear, sucking out blood, and spreading death. Aswang documents the first two years of the Duterte administration’s war on drugs. Duterte’s swaggering bombast during the campaigns, promising to fill Manila Bay with the corpses of drug users, helped him to win the elections. Making good on his promise, the streets of Metro Manila and other cities became killing fields of suspected drug users.
The film follows the “nightcrawlers,” a group of photojournalists documenting the carnage; Redemptorist lay brother Jun Santiago as he supports bereaved families; and family members navigating wakes, mass protests, and bloodied streets.
The film eventually focuses on Jomari, a scrappy waif caught in the middle of the drug wars. His friend whom he considers his elder brother, the teenage student Kian de los Santos, had been killed in cold blood by the police during a drug sting. Jomari’s parents themselves were in prison for drug use, leaving the boy to fend for himself. The environment of extreme poverty, violence and paranoia, somehow fails to extinguish the boy’s ebullience and grit. The film arrives at a moment of suspense when he suddenly goes missing and the documentarist begins searching for him.
Occasional snippets of radio broadcasts and scenes of a jam-packed drug detention center give some idea why the bloody campaign remained popular with some sectors of the public. Relatives and participants in mass protests assert that only the poor get killed, not the drug lords and the rich. (This assertion was recently underlined by Duterte’s pronouncement that one of the Presidential candidates in the upcoming May elections was a drug user, yet whoever that person might have not been killed, arrested, or even identified.) A Duterte official asserts that the drug problem is happening mostly in the poor areas and this is why the fatalities tend to happen there. In a stunning sequence, a cramped and airless hidden cell behind a filing shelf in a police station is exposed. The temporarily freed inmates claim that the officers had been extorting them for money that they didn’t have.
In somewhat of a belated postscript to the film, mass protests over the death of Jomari’s friend, Kian de los Santos, have led to the investigation, eventually supported by Duterte himself, of contradictory police accounts, CCTV footage, autopsy reports, and eyewitness testimony, resulting in the conviction for murder of the policemen involved. For many of the other thousand victims, a document like Aswang might be the nearest they could afford justice and a measure of dignity.
Arumpac had worked as a TV current affairs producer before starting this film, an experience that highlighted how much the documentary form allows space for empathy and immersion, hard to come by in her wonted news reportage form. These spaces include parentheses of quietude, droll humor, and poetry in Aswang that glimmer as flitting counterpoints in a labyrinth of grief, violence, and paranoia. The film ends with a sliver of hope, that in the act of “staring the monster (aswang) in the eye,” a new beginning can arise.
—Gil Quito
About the Director
Alyx Ayn Arumpac graduated with a degree in filmmaking from the University of the Philippines. She then worked as producer at Front Row, a current affairs news and documentary program at GMA TV network. She took a break from her job to pursue a Docnomads European Master’s degree (Belgium, Portugal, and Hungary), directing two short films set in Hungary.
Back in Manila, she was confronted by the beginning of Duterte’s drug war. With a cheap movie camera borrowed from her father, she started following a group of photojournalists, called the “nightcrawlers,” on their nightly sorties to document the effects of the drug war. She eventually cobbled together enough funds and contacts to finish Aswang from various film grant bodies in the Netherlands, France, Norway, Germany, the US, and Qatar. This grueling process helped her find the focus of her debut feature from a welter of footage that could fill three additional films. Aswang is the first and only documentary ever to win Best Picture in the 68-year history of the FAMAS (Filipino Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) Awards.
Watch the Trailer
Extras
ACT Human Rights Film Festival interview with director Alyx Ayn Arumpac:
Cinema Public interview with director Alyx Ayn Arumpac: