News:
In “Tribu,” real-life Filipino gangs collaborate onscreen
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: November 1, 2007
Members of the Sacred Brown Tribe, one of the real-life gangs in the film "Tribu," directed by Jim Libiran. (8Glasses cq Productions) |
MANILA: When Jim Libiran decided to make a movie about Manila’s youth gangs, he was determined to make it as realistic as possible. So he shot it in a neighborhood filled with gangs and cast actual gang members as actors.
He said he took this tack because it was difficult to separate his vision as a filmmaker from his longtime career as a journalist, particularly one with roots in this subject. “I grew up in the same neighborhood,” said Libiran, 41, in an interview. “As a journalist, gangs were my obsession.”
Six years ago, Libiran, one of the Philippines’s most respected television journalists, produced a television documentary on youth gangs. The gangs were still on his mind when he returned to school to study filmmaking, and he wrote the script that formed the basis of his debut movie, “Tribu.”
The film, a digital production that won several local and international awards this year, has contributed to the excitement in Manila over a recent explosion in independent filmmaking, which many here see as the best hope for reinvigorating the moribund Filipino film industry.
The movie depicts, in graphic detail, the gang culture of Tondo, a Manila slum notorious for its chaos, filth, poverty and violence. The story is told from the point of view of a 10-year-old boy who witnesses the violence as a gang avenges the death of one of its members. The gangs call themselves “tribes,” thus the title “Tribu.”
The main roles are played by actual gang members, who use the real names of their gangs in the movie, like O.G. Sacred, Young Cent and Raynoa. They communicate in so-called freestyle rap, which in Tagalog produces a crude but powerful street poetry.
Making a film with gang members on their competing turfs meant Libiran had to contend with the problem that some members of his cast were being hunted by rival gangs or the police. In fact, he said, production was interrupted every now and then by the news that one of his actors had been arrested or shot. During the acting workshop Libiran held for the cast, several of them showed up with weapons.
Perhaps because Libiran grew up in the neighborhood and knew it well, he managed to bring together members of six rival gangs to make the film. Libiran said they began collaborating on their rap music. They are now performing in shows in Manila and are considering cutting an album.
Libiran has promoted his film as a “tool for conflict resolution.”
In the film’s plot, as in real life, the youths of Tondo have few choices, Libiran said. The alternatives to joining a tribe are death or self-banishment.
There are more than a hundred such tribes in Tondo today, Libiran said, “each with their own set of codes of morality and honor.” Most of their members, he said, “are out-of-school youths whose poverty and lack of education almost assure most of them a not-so-bright future.”
In the opening sequence of the film, the 10-year-old boy explains the genesis of the tribes. They exist, he says, because the children are poor. They are poor because they or their parents lack jobs. In Tondo, the boy says, you have to be tough or you die. Even a child needs to be tough. But in the hell that is Tondo, he says, even a child can be God.
In Libiran’s view, the Tondo in “Tribu” could represent any urban center in the Philippines, a relatively poor country of more than 80 million people. In the cities, shanty towns are common, people live alongside open sewers, and women and children scrounge for food in garbage dumps. It is a dog-eat-dog world and an ideal breeding ground for crime and gangs.
What Libiran’s film does not explore is the authorities’ response to gangs and street crime. In many parts of the country, death squads roam the cities at night, hunting down suspected gang members, with tacit approval of the police. But the director has addressed this issue in his public appearances.
In a speech at Cinemalaya, the independent digital film festival here in August, where “Tribu” won the best picture award, Libiran appealed to the police and the Manila government. “There are other ways to stop the gang riots in Tondo and in other Tondos of the Philippines,” he said. “Please, have mercy. Don’t kill these children.”
Tondo has been featured in films before, notably in Lino Brocka’s 1976 masterpiece “Insiang,” the first Filipino film to be exhibited at Cannes. As in “Tribu,” the Tondo of “Insiang” is a cauldron of moral decay, hopelessness and, ultimately, desperation.
As Howie Severino, another television journalist, noted in a blog, “Tribu” is a bleak reminder of how little life in Tondo and other Philippine urban centers has changed in the last 30 years. “Dead ends then are dead ends today,” he wrote. “That’s the real tragedy.”
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