National treasure

Somehow, I always gain so much from the few movies I go out to the cinemas for. Like last night when I watched Thy Womb at SM North EDSA with LV.

Fifteen minutues before screening time, we breezed through the crowd that would go this way and that including the loooooonnng line of people buying tickets for Sisterakas. With our senior citizen IDs, we went up the express lane, bought our tickets, and entered the theater. Once seated inside, we realized that Cinema 11 was almost empty.

My take from the experience will last me a lifetime, though not much may be left of it being as old as I am. But such will certainly enhance whatever time I have remaining.

I am no moviegoer though I watch movies at home on TV and DVDs. I am no movie critic either though I am confident that I know enough to distinguish a good movie from a bad one.

Thy Womb is simple. It has no pretensions of delving into the issues of culture or politics or presenting a thesis on human character and how it unfolds according to the conditions it finds itself in. But it did all these without really trying, in no long-drawn melodramatic fashion.

The movie actually left me sad.

The Badjaos are my kababayans. They're Filipino just like me. The Philippines is their country just as it is mine. They speak their own dialect but many of them also speak Pilipino the way I do. They have the same color of skin like mine, though I envy them their beautiful exotic tan. They have the same Malay features that I have. But I realized last night how little I know them, or the way they live.

Children happily keeping their kites in the air as they traipse back and forth the uneven slatted wooden walkway without falling into the sea. Old women chatting as they sit by the few bundles of green leafy vegetables and a few mounds of root crops they are selling. A wife painstakingly copying from her friend's notebook the names of some of the girls she could consider to marry her husband and give him the child she couldn't.

Women engaging in lively banter as they clean fish for a feast. A couple out at sea for some catch and the husband being shot and almost drowning. A woman patiently weaving strips of some kind of dried leaf or tree bark into what will soon become a beautiful mat of various colors. A couple riding their boat to a rundown temple on their day of worship and on their way home, stopping the boat by some structure, calmly waiting for the sudden rain to stop.

Family and friends celebrating a wedding and keeping on with the music and the dancing through the sudden burst of gunfire from a distance. A mother agreeing to marry off her young and beautiful daughter to a much older married man, and even expressing admiration for the man's wife who undertook the search just to enable her husband to have a child; the young girl calmly going by her mother's wishes; the husband tearing up as he remembers the young girl's condition for him to leave his first wife when the baby comes; the wife assisting in the birth of her husband's and his young wife's baby.

These are the scenes from last night that remain vivid in my mind. Scenes that gave me a memorable peek into the lives of my kababayans, the Badjaos. Scenes that also clearly showed the best talents among us.

Thy Womb also brought me such a sense of pride that I have kababayans of exceptional talent and creativity. Of course both are gifts from God and people who have them are mere recipients. But that these recipients have chosen to harness, grow, and share their gifts deserve and have my support.

The talents that made Thy Womb the brilliantly crafted movie that it is have been written about and proclaimed in so many forums, media, and awards nights here and abroad. To dwell on them still would be an overkill. Besides, I believe people will watch what they choose to. And that really, just as we reap what we sow, we gain or lose with what we choose.

Nora Aunor may not be proclaimed a National Artist. But to me, she is a national treasure. The country  stands to lose big unless we mine and showcase her talent more and urgently. What a shame if the rest of the world beats us to it.

(Thanks for these beautiful photos, whoever took them.)