By LISA ITO
Bulatlat.com
This atrocious prohibition is not at all new. Seventeen years ago in September of 2007, the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) under Consoliza Laguardia imposed an X rating on a short indie film titled “Rights”, made to press for the safe release of Jonas Burgos.
This second X rating is now slapped against a longer documentary chronicling the same agonizing ordeal 17 years later, under the term of Lala Sotto-Antonio. Both the words then and now as publicly shared by the Burgos family, are evidence of the board’s now historical framing—bordering the criminalization—of the subject as unfit for public exhibition for “undermining the faith” in the government:
Exhibit A: “Scenes in the film are presented unfairly, one-sided and undermines the faith and confidence of the government and duly constituted authorities, thus, not for public exhibition” (MTRCB on “Rights”, 2007).
Exhibit B: “The film tends to undermine the faith and confidence of the people in their government and/or duly constituted authorities” (MTRCB on “Alipato at Muog”, 2024).
Here’s news for artists everywhere: the postcolonial state under different administrations can and will censor works when its interests are tipped and ticked off, whatever the cinematic or creative forms such content takes.
It sounds and looks familiar because it is what it is. In 2007, for instance, not only did we have an film on a desaparecido censored but also filmmakers detained in Quezon province (way before Jade Castro and friends), Teatro Obrero members arrested in Negros (before the 2019 raid), Kodao red-tagged in Manila (again), 46 journalists already dead (before the Ampatuan massacre in 2010), private or corporate interests puling their weight on screening platforms (hello there, Los Sabungeros and Asog in Cinemalaya), and the first iteration of the Human Security Act passed in this part of Southeast Asia (before the Anti-Terror Law of 2020).
I did not have to do much research for the facts stated in this post, and only needed to recollect and refer back to an old blog entry on the topic (written when diaristic micro-sites were designed by those so disposed, before today’s stream of consciousness takes). Here, I shared a country case study written for FOCAS: Forum on Contemporary Art and Society on the Philippines as a case of “culturing censorship, waging political repression.”
The struggle against censorship is certainly also a struggle against forgetting and collective amnesia. What we see today is our recent history of repression on repeat: the kind of throwback no one finds nostalgic or takes pleasure in.
Never forget: repression begets resistance. We stood up against censorship as artists of CAP back then. We stand up to oppose censorship now. Perhaps a tactical effort together to struggle for free expression and truth-telling is the next order of the day, keeping in mind the lessons from the decade that was.
Yesterday, we held at the UP Fine Arts Gallery a talk with the Indonesian art group Taring Padi in conversation with RESBAK, Tambisan sa Sining, UGATLahi Artist Collective and more. We had a full room even with the non-holiday holiday. From the story of one artists collective in Yogyakarta, we went on to share lessons and questions on how to break the impasse in organizing, how to care for the collective and our collections in managing conditions of precarity, how Cinemalaya to Gaza are spaces of struggle, and how to efficiently navigate the complexity of contemporary crisis, in solidarity with larger movements for people’s justice.
The MTRCB should look elsewhere for culprits as to why various regimes are so diminished in the the lens of many filmmakers and the works of more creators. For the best proof of unassailable governance, that can never be undermined by any work of art, is ensuring that truth and justice is carried through.
Reverse the X rating!
Stand for freedom of expression and truth-telling!
Surface Jonas Burgos and all desaparecidos!
