By LISA ITO
Bulatlat.com
Questions of visibility and invisibility marred this year’s festive Cinemalaya celebration, as the premiere screenings of the documentary Lost Sabungeros were cancelled due to “security concerns.”
Every festival has its own criteria and vetting system for the works it includes (and excludes) from the start. That it passed through a conjectured screening for the program, only to be dropped and cancelled after being widely promoted, hints at the least a slip or most a failure (of politics? of planning? of collaboration?) somewhere along the line.
Ironically, there is no lack of reference to the phenomenon of disappearances in this festival’s line up of films.
The landmark disappearance of Jonas Burgos by the military, 17 years ago, is the heart of another dokyu. The absence and loss of a father cast two separated sisters into the same world in this year’s best feature film (deservingly so). The halting of a community’s ritual reenactment of a massacre in Negros inspired an experimental film (Langit, Lupa) also quietly included in the line up. Finally, a vanishing ballot box and election watcher kicked off what is perhaps Cinemalaya’s greatest gift to Filipino voters everywhere.
So why deem a film with a new take on the subject—the disappearance of 30+ sabungeros—a security threat?
Your guess is as good as mine (maybe better). No one stepped up yet to name names beyond hints, pointing to perhaps how high the economic or political stakes may be (and how high up their players are in the political economy of culture).
What is clear though is clueing in can only take call outs so far. Whether cultural institutions were inhibited from making truth visible out of security or self-censorship, for further determination: whether this serves to protect what and whose interests, for further discussion.
This is frustrating because a call to action is often contingent on naming.
Certainly there are ways to move forward without the latter. The cancellation surely drums up more interest in watching the work. There are other venues for screening beyond the festival. But these spaces are perhaps even more vulnerable to risks and danger from forces which cannot be named or alluded to safely even in one of the country’s more securely guarded and surveilled mall chains.
That is why I think this is a missed opportunity for a festival to demonstrate how it can protect, through its mandate, a work which, like the rest, claims to reveal truth in the face of power.
The music of the awards night is followed by a sober morning awakening: that we will need more than freedom of artistic expression to protect ourselves from the real world threats represented so compellingly in cinema. 
The author is Concerned Artists of the Philippines’ vice chairperson and assistant professor at the UP College of Fine Arts.
