Tondo’s Tribes

Ebet is so immersed in the tribes’ way of life that, at the end of the film, he acts like God, committing a crime (well, at least the movie suggests that he is going to commit a crime) in behalf of his inebriated mother. From where he sits, that seems the right thing to do.

In his movie, Tondo might as well stand for every urban center in the Philippines, a largely poor nation of more than 80 million Filipinos, majority of whom are crammed into cities. Here, shanty towns are common, people live literally beside the sewer, and mothers look for food in the garbage. These communities reek of crime, a dog-eat-dog world that is a perfect breeding ground for gangs.

Tribal War. Members of the Sacred Brown Tribe, one of the real-life gangs in the film. (Photo: 8Glasses Productions)

It is also a world where mothers like Clarita Alia abound. In a span of five years, Alia, a street vendor in Davao City, the largest city in the southern Philippines, lost all her four sons to killers that were allegedly hired by government officials to rid the city of gangs and petty criminals. “We are poor but I thought even the poor deserve due process,” Alia told me in 2005, the year her third child was murdered.

In many parts of the country, gangs in poor coomunities in urban centers are a common problem. Hardly a week goes by in Davao City, for instance, without a petty thief, a drug addict or someone merely suspected of being a thug, getting killed. Many of the fatalities of the so-called Davao Death Square were children.

Summary execution as official response — some mayors, like Davao City’s Rodrigo Duterte, openly encourage the killing of gang members and petty criminals — has likewise become common. Recently, Duterte announced the creation of a special police unit that he had given the permission to shoot, with shotguns, gang members who roam the streets at night. This is a city that is considered the safest in the Philippines and, at one time, was recognized by the Unicef as the “most child-friendly city” in the country despite the continued killing of children.

Gang War. Gang members fight it out in the movie. (Photo by Leanne Jazul/8Glasses Productions)

Duterte has been widely hailed for his tough ways against criminals so that mayors in other cities, among them the mayor of Cebu City, the country’s second-largest metropolis in the central Philippines, publicly praised Duterte and, just as publicly, proclaimed that he would do the same thing in his city. Since then, the number of killings in that city increased.

While Libiran’s film did not explore this aspect of the gang culture in this country, the director tries to do just that in his public appearances. In his acceptance speech at Cinemalaya, the independent digital film festival held in August where “Tribu” won best picture, Libiran pleaded to the police and the Manila government: “There are others ways to stop the gang riots in Tondo and in other Tondos of the Philippines. Please, have mercy. Don’t kill these children.”

It was a jab at the new mayor of Manila, Alfredo Lim, a former Manila police chief and senator who is known as the country’s “Dirty Harry” for his tough and, some say, questionable ways against criminals.