Carlo Aquino as Oscar in Diablo | Source: Cropped from Diablo’s poster courtesy of Sulo: Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU and Espacio de Culturas
NEW YORK—Mes de Guzman’s Diablo, a Cinemalaya award-winning film, will be screened at the NYU Espacio de Culturas at 53 Washington Square 5, New York City, on Friday, November 1, at 7 p.m.
This film screening is free and open to the public. Registration is required—RSVP link: https://bit.ly/panawin-f24
Sulo: Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU and Espacio de Culturas present the film as part of the Visions/Panawin film series. A talkback with Diablo actress Althea Vega will follow after the film screening.
The film, written and directed by Mes de Guzman, won Best Picture at the 8th Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival held at the Cultural Center Main Theater in 2012. In addition to the Best Film award, it also won Best Actress for Ama Quiambao, Best Direction for Mes de Guzman, Best Cinematography for Tristan Salas, and NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema), all in the New Breed Full-Length category.
It was also Gawad Urian’s Best Screenplay.
Diablo is a story about Nana Lusing, who works and lives alone in a rural town. She looks forward to occasional visits by one or the other of her five grown sons. She lies sleeplessly on her bed at night, seeing a dark figure looming in her room. Is this the devil? Her late husband? A manifestation of her anxieties or imagination? As the story unravels, unity, love, and family values arise.
According to de Guzman, Diablo is a simple film with a simple structure. It is about a mother and her five sons. Nana Lusing, the main character, represents the typical Filipina mother of perpetual help – caring and loving to a fault, gentle and generous, passive and pious. Despite her frailty and her sons’ failures, she remains steadfast, never ceasing to listen to their endless woes and wonders. She is always there for them to offer comfort in every crisis. This virtuous image runs parallel to the persona of Mary, the mother of Christ.
Creating Diablo is de Guzman’s way of “showing the incessant direct effects of a history of colonization and Christianization on the present Philippine generation.” He adds, “Filipinos have been taught the sublimity of suffering and passivity, making us predisposed to these values without learning to cultivate our own God-given creativity and powers of choice.”
As a result, de Guzman said, “we have peddled a dubious message of belonging(ness) that is marinated in religious rhetoric, motivating people to commit the atrocities of self-denial and surrender of self-determination.”
De Guzman defends the film as not against religion, nor is it an arbitrary attack on the Catholic Church. Much less is it for the promotion of the sinister. “It fundamentally desires to put things in perspective as far as faith and its role in the survival of simple folk are concerned,” said de Guzman. “It is meant to raise awareness of the issue and the true meaning of the moral tenets we believe in and their real-life impact on us.”
Gil Quito, the film’s curator, said Diablo is a “fruit of the Cinemalaya system that has helped usher in the new wave of independent filmmaking in the Philippines,” which, “along with the digital revolution and consequent democratization of filmmaking—has engendered a burst of regional cinema presented in local languages. Such is the case with Diablo, set in writer/director Mes de Guzman’s native Nueva Vizcaya region and performed in its Ilocano patois.”
Quito describes de Guzman’s artistic sensibility as “too subtle for the film to be nothing more than an indictment.” “In the hushed ways that it layers nuance upon nuance,” he said, “the film addresses and resonates with existential anxieties and fears experienced universally. Where is the devil and its shape-shifting manifestations? Does it hide in mines under the earth or is it nearer us, right in the caverns of the human heart?”
The cast includes Ama Quimbao (Lusing), Lusing’s five sons, Arnold Reyes (Ruben), Freddie dela Cruz (Fernando), Jose Escobedo (Ronaldo), Carlo Aquino (Oscar), and Roeder Camañag (Alberto), Edelyn Laguit (Ima), wife of Ruben, and Althea Vega as Roeder’s girlfriend.
–With Ricky Rillera/PDM
