Mangansakan has carried on the task of weaving history and current issues of displacement, discrimination, and self-determination struggles of Moro people into his films and documentaries. One of these is the documentary, Forbidden Memory streaming on Cinema One’s YouTube channel from September 23 until 28.
DAVAO CITY, Philippines – Maguindanao filmmaker Gutierrez ‘Teng’ Mangansakan has seen battles this month against historical erasures and political propaganda.
Early this September, Mangansakan was invited to speak at a workshop on developing documentary work to local government information officers, organized by the Philippine Information Agency 11 and the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP).
To his surprise, the FDCP announced later on their Facebook page that the workshop is for the Regional Task Force – Ending Local Communist Armed Conflict, which is part of the national task force that has been red-tagging activists, indigenous peoples, and organizations in social media accounts of government and military units.
“I cannot and will not, out of profound principles, agree to the invitation had I known earlier that it is intended for RTF-ELCAC,” Teng posted on his Facebook account announcing his pull-out from the workshop.
The filmmaker said he felt offended and the invitation seemed like a “malicious effort” to “embarrass and discredit” his political stand on issues.
As a staunch anti-fascist and a vocal critic of the Anti-Terror Bill, the continued militarization of lumad and Moro communities as well as the extrajudicial killings of peasant and labor leaders and human rights defenders, transferring my knowledge to an organization that supports, abets, or perpetuates State fascism is the last thing I will ever do,” Mangansakan said.
Mangansakan has carried on the task of weaving history and current issues of displacement, discrimination, and self-determination struggles of Moro people into his films and documentaries. One of these is the documentary, Forbidden Memory streaming on Cinema One’s YouTube channel from September 23 until 28.
The documentary won the best documentary in the Cinema One Originals film festival in 2016.
The documentary was dubbed as the “greatest Marcos horror story never told” of a coastal village in Malisbong, Palimbang town of Sultan Kudarat where 1,000 men were massacred and thousands of women and children rounded up in a counter-insurgency operation in September 1974. The massacre was never reported or documented for decades, but Mangansakan’s documentary unveiled pained memories told by aged survivors moved to tears or stoned faces retelling those events.
Cinema One, in awarding the film, said: “In giving voice to the survivors of the Malisbong Massacre, in documenting their pain and their anger for future generations to hear and experience, Gutierrez Mangansakan’s Forbidden Memory transcends aesthetics to plainly deliver the powerful and inescapable truth that Ferdinand Marcos was not a hero.”
Mangansakan in an interview back in 2016 said the film is “a simple unembellished telling of the dark years of Martial Law. But I guess its rawness is its strength. The power of the film lies in the storytelling.”
Cinema One is streaming this film this month, joining other film festivals that have been showing documentaries and films about Marcos.
Mangansakan believes films have the power to be the voice for the people. “I am committed to utilizing my voice and my craft in the advancement of the rights of the people, and in promotion of social justice and rule of law.”(davaotoday.com)
