HAYUMA (Dragnet) Director's Statement

By MURPHY RED 

(Writer and Director)

As a child, I was raised in a fishing village in that part of my country where violence and impunity were ordinary day-to-day occurrences. It was the dawning of the two decades of the Marcos dictatorship right in the bailiwick of the dictator, the Ilocos region in the northern provinces of the Philippines.

Though belonging to a lower middle class family, I had no choice but to mingle with children of neighbours who subsist in utter poverty and who became the playmates I grew up with. Together, we were witness to disappearances of people, the spate of killings, and militarization that marked dictatorship and martial law.

That early, I felt deep repugnance of the system that runs the complexities of the social system I had no choice but endure. The culture that came with it -- mass submission to tyranny, blind obedience to coercion, collective surrender to oppression -- brought me to the crossroad of conformity and abhorrence. Not long after, when I went to college in Manila, I chose to walk the road less travelled, joined the people's militant anti-dictatorship movement. It was then that I realized that the social conditions that I saw in my province encompasses the entirety of my country. That realization brought me underground to join the national democratic revolution.

Before the height of the upheaval that commenced in the ostensible EDSA people power "revolution", I surface aboveground and volunteered with groups documenting and campaigning for human rights in the Philippines. And today, decades past the toppling of the dictator and the blossoming of the so-called Philippine democracy, I remain witness to the stark persistence of the same rotten system as prevalent in my childhood.

Hayuma (Dragnet) Raw Trailer

HAYUMA is the encapsulation of the arcane iotas that accumulated in my psyche through those experiences that seized me all too early from my childhood and brought me to radical movement that I never since thought of leaving. HAYUMA is the volatile particle that I, time and again, refuse to let go.

The main character, Lolita, is the emblematic depiction of my country, the Philippines, as the enduring mother to her children, the Filipino people, in upheaval; mute as she declines to speak of the deprivation and oppression so prevalent that her husband, Arturo, the depiction of the militant Filipinos cannot bear and battles, and he is disappeared by the sea monster which symbolizes the military machinery of the State. Lolita is defined by her enigmatic behaviour, to such an extent that she becomes a disembodied character, and defined not by her image but solely by what she desires but cannot do.

In the muteness of the lead woman character in the film, I and my creative team envision that the viewers begin to understand what they face, realize more deeply the unequal relationships and complex culture we all are unconsciously submerged into, and hear the pulsating voice of defiance that aches to break free.

"Hopefully, HAYUMA will start a dialogue about what we see but do not hear, who we are but we do not know, and what the real situation of our country is but we refuse to believe.  This film is about the openly secret lives of one hundred million individual Filipinos.  Right now."

I am making this film for every viewer around the world. For the Filipinos as alternative perception of their experiences in connection with each other, and for all other races and nations to fully comprehend the decline and disintegration grappled by Filipinos in their hundreds of thousands, invisible in tourism destinations, corporate ads, and mainstream media.

HAYUMA is a response to the necessity that we must all comprehend the experience of being subjugated and exploited, to see how each individual finds his or her own way in a stagnated social order. This film explores the emotional and psychological fallout on our women, men, and everyone in between, and our cultural experience when convention and transformation collide.

The personal, social, and cultural ramifications embodied by HAYUMA make up the complex underpinnings that solidify its significance. It is the accumulation of the ideals that so far makes up my and of those of a lot other Filipinos' set of values and beliefs. HAYUMA is a creative collision full speed ahead, a conception of a potent medium to alter, not just the general perception on the prevalent Philippines social realities, but the system itself that perpetuates it.

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HAYUMA (Dragnet) A film by Murphy Red

Production Concept

“HAYUMA” is an independently-produced motion picture both for local and international theatrical exhibition. With approximately 90-minutes running time, it is a full-length feature movie within the documentary-drama film genre. For audiences in other parts of the globe, the films is sub-titled DRAGNET.

Set in the rustic milieu of a poverty-stricken coastal village, the film is a tapestry of vivid images in motion, depicting disparate facets of rural fisher folk life, a haunting audio-visual exposé of the systemic socio-cultural and politico-economic exploitation and oppression of one social class by another.

The story revolves around a deaf mute single mother – “LOLITA” - who, despite gracefully passing through mid-age, still exudes exotic charm that conceals an origin and ancestry virtually anonymous to the local folks. Also known in the village as PIPE, Lolita’s journey departs from being a besieged widow desperately persevering to find her fisherman husband “ARTURO” who, one dark rainy night, sailed out to fish in the sea and never came back.

Storyline

Lolita’s story progresses through what seems like an eternal search for her husband while enduring the agony of the day-to-day effort to keep intact the bodies and souls of six children suddenly orphaned by the sea. Amidst the backdrop of a poverty-stricken fishing village submerged in utter privation and populated by people stagnated in wretched decadence, she struggles to survive in a manner any defenseless prey would in a jungle teeming with predators.

In the midst of public ridicule and abuse aimed at her physical disability and the malicious rumors about clandestine affairs she is alleged to have had or is having with a number of men in the village, Lolita strives to eke out a living for her children and herself. At times, she breaks even with the social injustice that she perceives to be a collective scheme to perpetually torment her. In most times, sadly enough, she ends up beaten and battered by undue violence complexed by utter deprivation.

Under the shadows of people with a set of outdated moral standards, Lolita is lured into the ocean of psychical influence of acute ignorance and malignant backwardness, the same deep sea as rough as what the fisherfolk believe to have drowned, the father of her children and other half of her life.

Despite its thorns, Lolita nevertheless persists in trekking the difficult roads traversing San Antonio, the village she learns both to hate and to love, the only place she believes here she can pursue the task of picking up the pieces to make her family whole again. At the brink of giving up all hopes of one day finding her husband somewhere in her blurry dreams, alive and well, she starts mending the meshes of her husband’s fishing net torn by whatever took Arturo and left behind as the only mute witness to his banishment.

Mutely mumbling the thundering chants of mantras that echoes in the inmost sanctum of eternal silence inflicted on her by a war-torn childhood, Lolita loses herself deep in the rituals of hayuma. And as if in a trance, numb and ambivalent to her children and to the oppressive mob that time and again stalks her and her children, Lolita weaves the supple twine into intricate meshes, but never gets to finish repairing her husband’s dragnet. 

Amidst the backdrop of a poverty-stricken fishing village submerged in utter privation and populated by people stagnated in wretched decadence, she struggles to survive in a manner any defenseless prey would in a jungle teeming with predators.

In the dimmer corners of the village, Lolita falls prey not just once to dreadful predators lurking at the ebb of her despair. However, beyond the haunting ruthlessness inflicted by her loss, her physical disability and the prevalent prejudice hovering above her physical handicap, the depth of the wounds she daringly endures accentuates the downright sorrow possessing her. Unknowingly, albeit fleeting, the exquisite naiveté she exudes brings sympathy from kindred souls, until the innate charm hitherto concealed by scars of grief pulls closer unanticipated affections she at first distances herself from but soon embraces in absolute surrender.

Lolita’s story is underscored, notwithstanding the complexity of the challenges she needs to face, by the perceived need to send her children to school despite her family’s destitution. Unable to understand the need to be forced daily to mingle with fellow children who never let a day without bombarding them with mockery, scorn and physical violence, her children, one after the other, begin to lose interest in attending classes, something she fervently disagrees to the point of forcing them to go to school.

Fully grasping the more important compulsion to help their mother earn a living, Lolita’s children are lured to shady money-making activities, eventually enticing them into a dragnet that they later realized as a trap but rather too late. Like what happened to the father they lost too soon early in their childhood, the children she inadvertently laid open to a situation almost similar to what she was forced to undergo through in her childhood were snatched out of Lolita’s life, apparently by monsters similar to what took her husband away.

Terrified at having to go through the same horror she underwent when she was widowed, she wasted no time trekking the same rough road all over again to find her children before time and chances run out. Against all odds, Lolita succeeds in finding all but one of her lost children. 

Until one fateful day, she was led by the same mob who beleaguered her, to a place where she found her missing daughter, lifeless and decaying in the same spot where her husband’s torn fishing net was found three days after he disappeared.

Lolita’s story ends in her realization of the real reason of her husband’s disappearance, her internal conflict of surrender and resistance as tragedy after tragedy struck her family and community, and her final acceptance of the social realities that brought about her fate that she finally decides to confront and bravely defy in resolute final steps to culminate her journey through the rough road to emancipation.

Cast of Characters

The cast of characters for the movie are reputable movie, television and theater actors who possess dependable reputation both locally and internationally. 

Marife Necesito

The lead role will be portrayed international actress MARIFE NECESITO who played opposite Hollywood actor Gael Garcia Bernal in “Mammoth”, a movie by acclaimed Swedish director Lukas Moodysson. She also possesses a massive artistic body of works as an actress in theater, television and motion pictures and a wide array of experiences as a TV commercial model.

Angie Ferro

In the cast, among others, are award-winning veteran film, theater and television actress ANGIE FERRO, theater actor JOEM BASCON and beauty queen turned movie and television actress MARIA ISABEL LOPEZ.

The film project is being created under the screenplay and direction of MURPHY RED, author, TV drama writer, playwright and film critic who won grand prize awards in several national-level literary competitions. He was the writer of the full-feature film “Haw-ang” (Before Harvest) and played significant roles in various film production and theater projects in recent years.