The annual True/False Film Festival went on as scheduled this weekend in my fair city. There was a whistling-past-the-graveyard feeling to this year's proceedings, given the spectre of a global pandemic that hung over almost every conversation I had with other attendees, particularly once the news hit that South by Southwest had canceled their festival and it was increasingly likely that True/False would be the end of the road for this year's festival season. Here in Columbia, Missouri, currently untouched by the pandemic, the show went on. Even lacking the pandemic, though, many of this year's films were grim, reflective of a world out of balance to an even greater degree than usual. I know that the selections at this festival aren't intentionally picked so that they rhyme each other, but it happens often enough. And so it was this year.
There's a sour comedy underlying Mayor (2020, directed by David Osit). The film details the job of governing Ramallah, the majority-Christian city in Occupied Palestine that sits ten minutes away from Jerusalem. The mayor is Musa Hadid, an Arab Christian, who has the unenviable task of providing municipal services to the city in the aftermath of the US President recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, even though the Palestinians repudiate such a designation. All the while, Hadid's city council is trying to formulate a "branding" for the city on the world stage in order to attract business, organize a Christmas celebration, and provide basic services in the face of an occupying government that obstructs even the most basic of utilities. The film documents Israeli incursions into the city on the pretext of protecting the Israeli settlements that ring the city and to put down the protests following the American embassy moving to Jerusalem. It's not an easy job.
This film has two principal virtues: first the personality of Hadid himself, and by extension his relationships with his colleagues, with his own family, and with the politics he must navigate. Small observations of his habits amid the film's broader concerns humanize him: his argument about the spacing of the letters in the new city slogan, "We Ramallah," is a droll bit of business, while his vaping habit is one of the few signs that he feels the stress of his office. He's essentially a pragmatist who wants to keep the focus of his office on the specific things he can to to provide for his constituents, but who must deal with events beyond his control. He observes a couple of Israeli incursions from a dangerously close distance, including one that threatens to invade his City Hall itself. He is keenly aware of the fact that the appearances his office keeps is as important as his governing, and when the film focuses on his reaction to branding he doesn't like, or the awkward glad-handing on a trip to Washington, DC, or even a visit from Prince William of the UK, he's careful to behave in a way that is firm, but not incendiary. Being threatened in his own seat of government, hardens him a bit, though, and provides the film itself with a tense final act.
It's second virtue is a focus on actual work. We watch the nuts and bolts of Hadid's city government as they go about the business of providing the actual services people expect. The biggest headache along these lines--Israeli incursions aside--is the need for sewage service. The streets of Ramallah occasionally overflow, and you can see the distaste on the faces of everyone who works on the process. This is complicated by they Israelis, who must provide permission to build a sewage treatment plant, and by Israeli settlements, who put external pressures on the city's infrastructure. The process of government underlies the entire film. It's fun to watch even as it frustrates or horrifies.
Mayor operates, too, as a portrait of the city itself. While it doesn't have the grandiosity of Woody Allen's portrait of Manhattan to the strains of "Rhapsody in Blue," it's not far removed from the city symphonies of the silent era. It has the same mating of image and music, and ends on the fountain celebration that occupies part of the business of the city council. There's a critique here of the encroachment of American capitalism in the repeated shots of fast food restaurants like KFC, or in the wry Starbucks knock off, Stars and Bucks. Ramallah is very much a real place in this film's depiction, and not just a proxy landscape for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In spite of its city symphony pedigree, this is an unfussy film, without the impulse to bludgeon the audience with overbearing style. It points the camera at the salient events of its purview and doesn't worry about perfect shots--it gets those shots, but it doesn't linger on them or exist as a framework for them. It only calls attention to itself as a film once, when Hadid asks the off-screen Osit something directly. This is primarily a vehicle for storytelling with an undercurrent of political outrage rather than a formalist film, but it's so smooth with it that it manages its moral argument without polemic. It's subtle and resigned, and it shrugs at the audience as if to ask, "What can you do? What will you do?" It's probably more effective for this approach.
Aswang (2020, directed by Alyx Ayn Arumpac) is also a portrait of a city in crisis. It imagines the Philippines and Manila in particular as plagued by the title monster from the darkest Philippine folklore. The Aswang is a shapeshifter and a boogieman, whose passage through the night causes fear wherever it travels. There are a number of horror movies that shares a title with this documentary, but those fictional versions are nothing compared to the horrors this film describes. Its ostensible subject is the spreading societal impact of President Rodrigo Duerte's "war on drugs," a war that has seen vigilantes and the police murdering suspected drug users with impunity. The Aswang of this film's imagining is a conflation of fascist social policy, authoritarianism, poverty, and police impunity. Manila under this regime is a night world here, in which orphan children wander the squalor of the city's slums, bullet-ridden bodies lie in the streets, cleaning crews brush blood to the gutters, and grieving families weep over the caskets of aid organizations devoted to burying the indigent. Part of the film is from the viewpoint of the coroners who bury the dead, either at the behest of family or in mass crypts for paupers who haven't been claimed. They note the point at which the trickle of their business turned into a flood when the current president of the USA visited Duerte and voiced his support. This was like declaring an open season. As in Mayor, this is a film that is touched by the cancer of Trumpism.
The central horror of Aswang is what authoritarianism does to people, and how authoritarianism and a dispossesed people are mutually parasitic.
There's a real feeling of a populace that has been gaslit into supporting Duerte. A man who is grieving vows that the victim in his own family was clean and law-abiding even as he avows his support of Duerte. A protest toward the end of the film in which Duerte is depicted as having a devil behind his face and that face is burned in effigy seems to have no concrete effect. The police themselves have seen an opportunity to squeeze the lower classes with a secret prison in which to place kidnapped persons who are held for ransom. If they can't pay the ransom? They vanish completely. When this is discovered by a human rights organization and the journalist who works with them, the police contrive charges in order to legitimize their crimes. And yet, their crimes are never directed at the affluent or the drug lords who feed the city's poor neighborhoods. It is precisely the poverty of their chosen victims that makes them so attractive. Who's going to stop them?
The film reserves its most damning imagery for the children with which it concerns itself. These are mostly kids who have been orphaned one way or another by family members killed or disappeared. One of the film's central characters is the boy, Jomari, whose parents are in prison. He runs with his friends who playact the murderous activities of the vigilantes/policemen/death squads that have made them orphans in the first place. This scene is more chilling than any of the aftermaths of violence on which the film trains its camera. Jomari eventually disappears prompting the filmmakers to go looking for him. When they find him, he tells them that he's been at the mercy of social services. When he's eventually reunited with his mother, they wander the streets sifting through junk looking for things to sell. When a police car passes them, it offers the background of terror of the corrupt system in which they find each other.
Other scenes from the film: the funeral of paupers in a mausoleum that seems set in a landfill. The kids who make their beds on top of the crypts. The flagellants who parade through the streets seeking divine intervention. The first body the film shows us, its head wrapped in packing tape. This is a rich and horrifying film with an observational style that lets the horrors speak for themselves without the crutch of exposition. Its narrative about the aswang is almost beside the point, but for the creeping sensation that the aswang is all of society's worst instincts. It's a monster with a million faces. It's a monster that's us.
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