Tondo’s Tribes

By Carlos H. Conde

MANILA — There’s a scene in “Tribu,” the hottest independent digital film to hit the Philippines this year, that is at once tender and, as the movie later establishes, disturbing. A boy prepares food for his junkie mother. He brings the meal to her room, only to find her asleep. The child puts down the bowl of rice and vegetable, and snuggles by his mother, wrapping his arm around her waist. Ever so gently, the mother — who, in the opening sequence of the movie, is shown having furious sex with her lover, a married drug addict — caresses the boy’s hand.

There are other touching scenes in this violent and frenetic movie, the first feature by Filipino journalist turned filmmaker Jim Libiran, but this one lays all the groundwork for what happens next. The boy, only 10, gets sucked into the life and subculture of Manila’s youth gangs, who are as relentless in cutting up people as they are passionate about hip-hop and freestyle rap, which they use to bond and to communicate.

As “Tribu” unflinchingly makes clear, there’s no way a child can get out of the cycle of violence in Tondo, a slum in Manila known for its thugs, chaotic and filthy neighborhoods, abject poverty, and street violence. As if to hammer the point even deeper, a teenager in the film who looks like he was the only one who has a shot at getting out of this decayed Tondo — he wears a school uniform all throughout the movie and is in love with a girl who works in a call center far away from the squalor — is himself butchered by his brother’s rival gangs.

Young and Restless. Ebet, the 10-year-old boy in “Tribu” played by Karl Balingit, witnesses the violence among Tondo’s gangs. (Photo by Leanne Jazul/8Glasses Productions)

For Libiran, whose film won the best-picture award in this year’s Cinemalaya independent film festival, the youths of Tondo don’t have much choice. There are only three alternatives: self-banishment, death, or joining a tribu, or tribe, as Tondo’s gangs are called. There are more than a hundred such tribes in Tondo today, Libiran says, “each with their own set of codes of morality and honor.” Most of them, he says, “are out-of-school youths whose poverty and lack of education almost assure most of them a not-so-bright future.”

In the opening sequence of the film, the child, named Ebet, narrates the genesis of these tribes. They are there, he says, because they are poor. They are poor because they or their parents don’t have jobs. In Tondo, the child says, you have to be tough or you die. And even a child needs to be tough. In Tondo, he intones, even a child can be God.