The film excavates how mythmaking bolstered the return of the Marcoses to power, and examines the specters of Datu Bendahara Kalantiaw, a pseudohistorical invention of speculative fictionist Jose Marco
MANILA, Philippines – “The story of Jose Marco was suggested to me by my wife’s niece, Justine, who taught history in Iloilo,” says Chuck Escasa of the provenance of his latest film Ghosts of Kalantiaw, which screened at this year’s Sinag Maynila Independent Film Festival and went on to win the Jury Prize in the documentary category for how it “explores how the manipulation of facts can reshape collective memory, challenging viewers to reflect on the consequences of distorting history in both personal and societal contexts.”
Continues the director, “This was during the time when fake news and historical revisionism was sweeping the country. I thought it would make a great story for a documentary, and did some research on it.”
Escasa then submitted the film concept to a call by the Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF) for full-length documentaries. The idea was later accepted and awarded with a production grant, alongside Divine Factory by fellow Filipino filmmaker Joseph Mangat. It was also at SGIFF that the film had its world premiere last year.
“I was quite surprised that it was accepted,” shares Escasa. “That was in the year 2021. But since it was still the pandemic, we couldn’t shoot right away. It took us two years to shoot and edit the documentary.”
Earlier this year, Ghosts of Kalantiaw also served as the closing film for the 16th edition of Cinema Rehiyon, the flagship project of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts’ (NCCA) National Committee on Cinema.
The docu-fiction film taps into the post-truth era and excavates how mythmaking has bolstered the return of the Marcoses to power, and shaped the politics of many Filipino lives by invoking the specters of Datu Bendahara Kalantiaw, a revered figure in a small town in Panay Island and a pseudohistorical invention of speculative fictionist Jose Marco, who is credited with forging several hoaxes and documents relating to Philippine history.
In many ways, Ghosts of Kalantiaw is a story about the fragility of memory. As historian Ambeth Ocampo says in the film, “The mind creates its own fictions.”
Now, the documentary is set to screen at the 12th Active Vista Human Rights Festival, running from September 19 to October 6 in select theaters across the country.
I caught up with Escasa recently to talk about putting Ghosts of Kalantiaw to the screen. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I learned that you took creative writing at UP Diliman and studied filmmaking at the Mowelfund Film Institute. Could you talk about your path into cinema? What was that transition like?
Well, literature and cinema are the twin sisters of art. The act of writing attempts to tell a story while conjuring images. After UP, I landed a job scriptwriting for the children’s TV show Sesame (later Batibot). Many of my co-workers there were from the film industry. Later I worked for a few years in advertising and then one summer I attended a film workshop at the Mowelfund Film Institute where I made my first short film. That’s also where I met my wife, Aimee. Until today we work together making movies.
(Sesame is the Philippine version of popular children’s show Sesame Street, which ran for 1 season in 1984 before becoming Batibot.)
What made you gravitate towards the myth of Datu Kalantiaw for it to be the central focus of the film?
During the Duterte regime, trolls started to dominate social media. They attacked history and peddled alternative truths that promoted the agenda of those in power. And the people easily fell for it. I guess I was looking for a story that would reflect such a scenario. The myth of Datu Kalantiaw is a compelling study that parallels our people’s attraction to scams and frauds.
The film begins with an image of the water and the line “The Greeks used to believe that there was a river of memory, but they also had a river of forgetting.” Why did you choose to open the film this way?
The line came from Mr. Ambeth Ocampo himself when we interviewed him. Right away, I felt that would make a great prologue, and a great visual. And when we went to Batan, Aklan to interview the residents, I saw that the town was surrounded by a river, and the town’s history was tied to that river. So then everything clicked.
The score is particularly eerie and transfixing, as though it heightens the sense of doom that looms over the film. Did you always intend for it to feel this way?
Yes I did, although sense of doom might be too strong a word. Foreboding, maybe. The music was composed by our National Artist for Music, Dr. Ramon P. Santos. We worked very closely in choosing the appropriate mood and music for each sequence.
The film chiefly applied the talking-head approach alongside animation and archival images. Were there other visual experimentations you wanted to try going into Ghosts of Kalantiaw?
Initially, I also wanted to create some sequences where the ghost of Jose Marco, played by Joel Saracho, meets and chats with Ambeth Ocampo. But our schedules did not make it possible. Sayang.
I thought it’s interesting how you found a throughline in the story of Kalantiaw and the return of the Marcoses to power, particularly in the context of mythmaking. How important do you think that we see connections such as this in our history and that we don’t take things at face value?
The historical deja vu is both fantastic and horrifying. This so-called Bagong Pilipinas is just a rehash of the 1970s New Society. The BBM camp even had the gall to blast the Bagong Lipunan theme song during the presidential campaign. That was really eerie and depressing.
The Marcoses are big on mythmaking, that’s how they hold sway over the people and keep themselves in power. Our generation who fought in the streets during the Martial Law [era] is now too old and maybe too tired to go back out there and resist water cannons. Today, we need to be creative to connect with the generations that came after us and tell them true stories of a country and its people ruled by one power-hungry man for 20 years. – Rappler.com
