Tondo’s Tribes

Tondo has been explored in films before, notably in “Insiang,” the late Lino Brocka’s 1976 masterpiece that was the first Filipino movie ever shown at the Cannes film festival. In “Insiang” as in “Tribu,” Tondo is a cauldron of moral decay, hopelessness and, ultimately, desperation. It is noteworthy that the Tondo in “Insiang” is no different than the Tondo in “Tribu,” which perhaps merely underscores the fact that, decades after the regime of Ferdinand Marcos ravaged the country, not much has changed.

It is this social stagnation that Libiran, who is from Tondo, finds compelling, which pushed him to make a television documentary on these gangs in 2001 and a subsequent short film on the same subject. When he took up a master’s degree in film at the University of the Philippines, Libiran realized he could not extricate himself from it, so that he wrote the script for his thesis. It went on to win the second place in the scriptwriing category of the 2006 Palanca Awards, the country’s highest literary prize.

Concerned that his script would end up like the many prizewinning scripts that were never turned into film, Libiran borrowed money from friends and family and, with additional funding from the organizers of Cinemalaya, shot the film. Shooting took place during the weekends in Tondo, the only time he could take time off from his day job as head of news production for ABC-5, one of the country’s television networks. Shooting was interrupted every now and then by news that a cast member, most of whom are actual members of gangs who had never acted before, was arrested or shot at.

Libiran, who as a journalist has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for ABS-CBN, the country’s largest network, had never made a feature length film before “Tribu.” Although he had formal education as a filmmaker, his journalistic chops served him in good stead in making “Tribu.” He approached the film like a documentary subject. His main actors are actual gang members who used their real gang names in the film. Perhaps more remarkable is the fact that Libiran managed to cast members of six different gangs who, on the street, would probably butcher each other. He had pasted posters around Tondo that said “Are you member of a gang? Do you want to be a movie star?”

Documentary-Style. Jim Libiran (center) confers with his production staff. (Photo: 8Glasses Productions)

Indeed, “Tribu” does have a documentary feel to it. Shot in digital, it uses live sound, with a camera handling that is jerky, which lends the movie a certain journalistic panache that the YouTube generation might find acceptable, even likable. The lighting is dark, as can be expected, and the story seems to take a while to develop but these are quibbles that you don’t notice as the camera chases the gangs in Tondo’s narrow and fetid streets, as icepicks plunge into chests, as butcher knives slice young necks.

A comparison to “City of God,” the excellent film by Fernando Meirelles about Rio de Janeiro’s street gangs, is inevitable but Libiran is not comfortable with the juxtaposition. His film, he says, is not all fiction. “It is 98 percent fact and two percent fiction.” (Except for the gunfight in the finale, everything in the film, Libiran says, actually happened.)

Libiran knows that “Tribu” can make a viewer feel heavy in his heart, a point he emphasized during a recent screening in UP. But that’s the idea, he says. Like the Filipino social-realist films of old, his film is meant to disturb and spur people to action. “Tribu,” after all, is not escapist fare. It is, for all practical purposes, a documentary masquerading as a movie. It is an orgy of violence and pathos that a journalist, who knows the subject very well, feels he needed to show without the filters of mainstream media and without the prejudices of a type of journalism that is slave to the sound byte or the clip.

Libiran thinks the country’s censors would never approve his film for commercial exhibition. Judging by the images onscreen — there are intense sex scenes, lots of slashing and shooting and blood and drug use — he may be right. “It is ironic that a 10-year-old in Tondo can become a gang member but can never see a film about the experience,” Libiran says.

Speaking of irony, it abounds in “Tribu”: the gang members who preach brotherhood but don’t hesitate to kill, the family who delights in and savors a meal of “pagpag” (food found by scavengers in the trash and recooked), the use of the Infant Jesus as patron saint in a place where children are ravaged by their sheer existence.

Also, the most tender family in “Tribu” thrives on violence — the father, who is loving and caring toward his son, the leader of one of the gangs, works as a butcher at a slaughterhouse, where Libiran shot actual scenes of carnage that is sure to make Peta blanch. As it is, this butcher bit is pointless — unless you keep in mind the fact that, in Davao City, many of the alleged killers of gang members and suspected petty criminals work as butchers during the day and, for less than $50 dollars, literally butcher a person at night, using the same knives they use to kill pigs and cattle. (Carlos H. Conde/pinoypress.net)