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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