“You can’t separate your politics from your art because it’s part of human thought: what makes our politics makes our society. If you think that politics should be separate from art, then what would you make art about?”

Pepe Diokno, photo from Techie.com

Not to be confused with the older Jose “KaPepe” Diokno, Pepe Diokno is in his senior year at the University of the Philippines, taking up Film and Audiovisual Communication. His first film, Engkwentro (2009), follows brothers Richard and Raymond through the labyrinthine alleys of a slum in Anytown, Philippines. This project began as a documentary before being fictionalized into a feature-length piece that Diokno intended to submit as his thesis. Daunting production costs however prompted him to enter an earlier draft of the screenplay to the 2009 Cinemalaya competition, which grants young filmmakers just enough seed money to minimize the dent.

Engkwentro required a set to be built in the middle of the Santa Ana racetrack, hundreds of extras, and countless overdubs in both visual and audio components, making it no small feat to mount. And yet it was finished in a little less than a year, and went on to bag honors at the 5^th Cinemalaya as well as the the gold lion at the 66^th Venice Film Festival. –Interview by Alice Sarmiento

Do you have any special requirements or conditions necessary for your working environment?

I don’t, not really. What I can’t do though is just sit down and say okay, I’m going to think, I’m going to write, it’s going to come out. It really doesn’t happen like that for me. I procrastinate so much, it’s usually just me waiting for that “Eureka!” moment, for that epiphany.

Engkwentro took less than a year to finish, in spite of the relatively grand scale. Was there ever a point in which you realized that embarking on such an ambitious project was a mistake? What kept you going?

A lot of times! It was extremely hard to mount, we had to build a set, dealing with the extras was very difficult because we had over 400 extras and almost half of them were kids. There’s two things you should not have in a film project: kids and animals. And we had to feed all of them. And come shooting time, it was extremely exhausting before takes, constantly having to yell, “Walang titingin sa camera!”

The subject you were dealing with in Engkwentro is essentially nothing new. Duterte has been around for almost two decades and death squads operate in almost all parts of the country. What prompted you to tackle this subject now?

I was doing a documentary in 2007, on jails from North Luzon to Davao, this was for US Aid and Rock Ed Philippines. In a prison in Davao I met these two brothers, Richard and Raymond, they were 15 and 17, both members of two different gangs who were being chased by the Davao Death Squad.

I had wanted to do a documentary, but rules for talking to minors in jail were very strict after Bunso …so I couldn’t record voice or video, I had to take down notes. I couldn’t even get their addresses so I couldn’t track them down. But that meeting sort of prompted the whole project, I had met these two brothers who unlike me had no hopes for themselves, they sort of face death as soon as they set out on their own.

That really shook me and it started from that. It took two years for the idea to simmer and I decided to enter it to Cinemalaya. Initially I wanted to use it as my thesis, but I needed money to make it. So I decided to enter it, and luckily it got in.

The script I submitted was actually very raw, it was just me behind it and it was done in a rush. But luckily it got accepted that December, and the Cinemalaya committee loved the script, but I wasn’t happy with it—not until April. It was really after the first day of filming that I really sat down with it and thought, “Okay, I really have to do this. I have to force it out of myself already.” So after the first day, I re-wrote the whole thing in English to check for cohesion and get a clearer picture of what was wrong and right with it, and that night we finished the script.

Why did you decide to write the dialogue in several different languages and dialects?

We were supposed to set it in Davao, but for many reasons we didn’t, especially after we realized that this problem wasn’t confined to Davao. It was happening in Cebu and Manila, and it’s been happening since Martial Law. So we wanted to make a film that didn’t speak solely of Davao but of the whole country, so we thought about language as a universalizing factor that would blur the location. One of the gangs spoke Bisaya, one spoke Tagalog, the extras spoke Pangasinense, Ilonggo, just to mix things up and blur the location.

Why film?

I like film, I’ve liked it since high school and it’s felt like a medium where I can be myself. I like the business aspect, the art aspect, getting everything and everyone together. And I’ve always felt it was a powerful medium and it’s the best way to tell a story.

How do you feel about your age almost always being cited in relation to your film?

It’s inevitable. I don’t like it when it’s the only basis for everything and it stops people from judging the work for what it is. While you should take the filmmaker into context, I think it’s extremely dishonest and dangerous, because when you judge the film by the filmmaker, then you assume so many things about the film.

And you know what they say about when you assume: you make an ass out of you and me.

There has also been criticism regarding the disconnection between your subject matter and your actual status: being young, privileged, and having the kind of connections you have by virtue of being a Diokno.

Funny story. During the first screening of the movie at the CCP, this woman in the bathroom went up to another woman–a stranger no less–and she was very loud about her disdain for my movie. She kept going, “Did you see that f**king movie? I hate that f**king movie! Who does that kid think he is? Just because he’s a Diokno!” Little did she know, she was actually talking to the wife of my cinematographer.

But very early on, I’ve always had to deal with similar situations, having grown-up speaking English and attending a private school. But does that mean that I cannot make films about what’s happening in our country? Sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective to tackle an issue. Would I have been able to cover this issue if I had not been part of a film project and did not have my connections? I think not because I would not have been able to discover the story of Richard and Raymond and have gotten this film made.

Your work represented the Philippines at Venice. Is individual achievement necessarily a point for National pride,

I don’t think so, I don’t think Manny Pacquiao or Charisse Pempengco reflect what we are about as a nation. I have this theory that success for Filipinos is really success in other lands. We define success in terms of making it big abroad, but when it comes to Filipinos finding success in their own country there’s always so much suspicion about having connections or money or having slept around. I think it speaks of our mentality of us being this kawawa little race; that we have to make a mark, and to “conquer the world” is the only way to do it.

But when we got to Venice, there was the Philippine flag right over the logo of the film festival. That helped me realize then and there that we do carry the name of the country at any rate.

At the Venice Film Festival

If there’s any benefit to all these victories abroad, I’d like to think it’s that the last few years have proven Filipino films of being world-class quality. And that’s a good thing; not necessarily for the whole country, but at least for the industry itself because more films are being made, meaning there are more jobs for people, and that’s really what you make films for. It’s not about the prestige. The prestige can only get you so far.

I really love it that any given week, there’s a handful of projects being done, and that means hundreds of people on a crew, from carpenters to extras are getting jobs. When you meet these people, you’ll find that most of them work on a per-project basis and if there are no films being made, there’s nothing to help them monetarily.

How do you reconcile these recent international success stories with the fact that most of them do not represent Filipino society in a flattering light, and have even been accused of exploiting the image of poverty?

We were at a film festival in Greece a few months ago, and this turned the spotlight on Filipino cinema: the selection was Engkwentro, the films of Brillante—Kinatay, Serbis; the films of Raya Martin, Adolf Alix, John Torres…Bakal Boys was in the main competition. But after all that, this Greek woman asked, “Is this really what the Philippines is like?” as if she felt bad about the Philippines. And I thought of me and Ralston (Jover, the director of Bakal Boys), and we had to ask ourselves about this image we were portraying of the Philippines. Should we be more mindful of it? Should we feel embarrassed?

My answer’s pretty simple: if you live in a country that’s full of snow, then naturally your films will have snow; If you live in a country where more than half of the population lives below the poverty line, then naturally your stories will be about these people. It’s not necessarily exploitation. I never even believed Engkwentro would make it abroad. I really didn’t make it for that.

Still from Engkwentro, Felix Roco and Daniel Medrana

The reason Lino Brocka’s films were about poverty before, and our films touch on poverty now is not because filmmakers want to exploit the situation. It’s simply because there was poverty then and there’s poverty now, and more people are poor now than they were then.

So before anyone can tell us that we’re exploiting poverty for what it is or that we’re using poverty in order to get into festivals, first off, we need to address the problem of poverty. And how can you address that if you don’t talk about it and admit it exists. It’s a way of threshing out our own wounds.

A Very Special Responsibility to Society

Maybe in the next twenty years if we have a larger middle class, then we’ll see more middle class stories such as love stories being made. But for now, I don’t think it’s even responsible that we talk about love. I don’t think it’s even responsible to use film to talk about teenagers from The Fort doing drugs.

What do you mean by responsible when it’s someone else’s reality? It’s not necessarily a lie, it’s just a matter of different people living through different situations.

For a filmmaker, I don’t think it’s responsible to create a world like that while totally ignoring the other side of the coin. I’ll probably make a film like that, but to make a film like that just because I want to represent the Philippines as this nice and pleasant world–I don’t think that’s responsible.

In the Philippine context and in light of recent events surrounding the fairly recent National Artist “scandal”, do you think there’s any way to separate your politics from your art?

I don’t think we need to. Politics has been a part of human interaction since the time of the Greeks. It’s part life just like love is, and that would be like asking to separate love from film or from art. You can’t separate your politics from your art because it’s part of human thought: what makes our politics makes our society. If you think that politics should be separate from art, then what would you make art about?

Considering definitions of art being made for art’s sake, rendering it, as Oscar Wilde had written, “quite useless”. You have to ask, is this is even the cinema’s responsibility?

If that’s what you subscribe to, then go ahead and make Star Cinema movies and I will watch them. For me, my personal thing is to make things about conflict, about human interaction, and politics happens to be a part of human interaction. The only way to make a film about human rights is not to make a film about human rights but to make a film about humans. So very early on, I knew that I was tackling the last 24 hours of these boys.

Some people asked me after, “Why didn’t you make a film about the DDS? Why didn’t you show the DDS?” Ang sakit ng maraming filmmakers is trying to say too much in a film. Later on I had to sit down and think about what I’m really trying to say with this movie. Am I trying to say that the DDS is bad, or am I trying to say that killing in general is bad?

If there’s criticism about the film being too full of politics, then thank you.