Whatever Happened to ‘Asog’?
Whatever Happened to ‘Asog’?
Actors Rey Aclao and Arnel Pablo walking through the devastation of the region. | Feature art by Abigail Manaluz
The issue of censorship dominated Filipino film discourse over the past year. The most highly publicized cases were that of Alipato at Muog, Lost Sabungeros, and Dear Satan. For months they were written about in local publications like Rappler, GMA, and the Philippine Star until each film found some kind of resolution—except for Asog.
Ever since its lone Cinemalaya screening at Ayala Malls Manila Bay was seemingly sabotaged, there has been radio silence locally on this important (and defiantly well-made) docudrama about the violent displacement of civilians in Sicogon Island by Ayala Land Inc. Asog was an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival’s Docs-in-Progress showcase in 2023 and had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City the same year. It went on to screen at over 40 film festivals around the world and won ten international jury prizes, and was most recently featured at Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights. It has so far screened in over 15 countries in over five continents. And yet there has been an absolute blackout in our local corporate media spaces about the film. No news articles were published surrounding its censorship, not even one review.
So what exactly happened with Asog?
A quick summary of events: In the aftermath of the devastation of Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) in 2013, Ayala Land, Inc. (ALI) and Sicogon Development Corp. (SIDECO) blocked 6,000 residents from returning to their homes in Sicogon Island, Iloilo. Private military forces burned their homes and crops in order to clear the land for the development of an airport and a luxury resort. They forced them out by the barrel of a gun. But 784 families refused to abandon their lands and continued to assert their rights to them—and they wanted reparations. They were stonewalled for eight years and only received a signed compromise agreement from ALI and SIDECO after activists managed to secure funding from Doc Society UK in 2021 for the making of a documentary feature about their situation. This feature was Asog.
The signed agreement legally committed the companies to meet a list of demands, including:
Four new neighborhoods totaling 30 hectares were to be allocated to the 784 families.
Full financing of the construction of 784 homes, one for each family that refused to leave the island since 2013.
A 76-million peso land fund that would prioritize Federation of Sicogon Island Farmers Fisherfolks Association (FESIFFA) members including subcontractors and both skilled and non-skilled members.
38 million pesos for lost livelihood and capacity building funding.
Titles to the lands must be given to the residents.
ALI stalled on these reparations as much as they could. During a ten-month halt in production between 2021 and 2022 due to COVID restrictions, they only funded the construction of six homes. When Asog was in its last stages of production in May 2023, they funded 144 more. And once the film was finally finished and screened at international festivals, the real estate developer sped up their progress and funded another 250. But they were far from done; there was still a long way to go to meet all of the agreed on reparations. This is where Cinemalaya comes in.
Personal screenshots taken on the day of Asog’s screening. The picture on the right shows what the page is supposed to look like if tickets are available online. Instead, Asog’s page does not even show a schedule for the film, which means that tickets could not be purchased on SureSeats, Ayala’s online ticketing website.
In August 2024, Asog made its Philippine premiere at the Cinemalaya film festival, the same year the festival controversially canceled screenings of the Lost Sabungeros documentary. There was a major conflict of interest here: for the first time, all Cinemalaya films were screening exclusively at an inconveniently located Ayala-owned mall. Unsurprisingly, the single screening of Asog was seemingly sabotaged by Ayala management. For one, the film was scheduled to play at the exact same time as the local premiere of the highly anticipated documentary about the 2022 presidential campaign of Leni Robredo, And So It Begins. Rappler CEO and Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa and the former vice president herself were in attendance as well, guaranteeing that all festival attention for the evening would be on their film. Second, tickets for the Asog screening were reportedly blocked off from prospective audience members on the day of the event. Several moviegoers complained online that cinema staff told them that the screening was “sold out.” But it was actually nearly empty.
I am a personal witness to these events as I was lucky to get seats for its one-time screening. Tickets for Asog were not released at the same time as the rest of Cinemalaya’s competition films. They only surfaced randomly online without any announcement at noon on the Monday the week it was set to be shown. I had been refreshing the page every few hours, and so I was able to get tickets very soon after they were made available. My estimate would be that less than a fifth of the seats in the theater were filled for the screening. Upon further research, it appears that the majority of the audience present were the residents involved with the making of the film. And so it’s unclear how many tickets were actually sold to the general public before it was blocked off. Not only was the screening sabotaged in this way, but before the film started, a misleading disclaimer was shown that whitewashed the gravity of ALI’s damaging actions on the residents featured in the film. None of the filmmakers were aware that this message would preface the film. It falsely claimed that the community was satisfied with the property giant’s help. How utterly absurd of them to inform the aggrieved residents in the crowd of their supposed satisfaction.
This is the disclaimer that Ayala Cinemas placed before the start of the film.
Soon after, Asog’s Instagram account published a piece exposing ALI and what had happened during the film’s Philippine premiere. It was cross-posted on the account of actor and Emmy-award winning host of The Traitors, Alan Cumming, who helped co-produce the film alongside Oscar winner Adam McKay and Fire Island star Joel Kim Booster. It went viral, and there was massive online backlash against the Ayala conglomerate. Within 48 hours of the post, ALI finally paid the rest of the overdue 32 million pesos in reparation funding for the construction of the homes.
Over the succeeding months after Cinemalaya, Asog continued to screen at different prestigious film festivals across Europe, and along the way more homes were built. But unlike fellow censored films Alipato at Muog and Lost Sabungeros, it was never again seen in the Philippines. According to a recent post from the Asog team, Ayala Cinemas allegedly blocked a national theatrical distribution deal for the film. I wonder if it also limited its ability to screen in film festivals around the country given its unusual absence in the scene for the rest of the year. It oddly hasn’t even been featured at the University of the Philippines’ Film Institute, a space normally considered a safe haven for controversial political films. They held several screenings for the two other censored films just mentioned, both of which were highly critical of the military and local enforcement.
Could it possibly be more difficult to criticize a multi-billion dollar corporation than one’s own government? Perhaps as a community we need to take a closer look at those who have the most power to control our access to political art in this country.
As of writing, 474 homes have been successfully built by FESIFFA. However, they have not been paid at all for the expenses of hauling the construction materials to Sicogon. This seems like an underhanded way to sabotage the whole reparations process by adding an unnecessary financial and logistical strain on FESIFFA. And even more importantly, the residents have not yet been given the deeds to the lands their new houses were built on.
It’s unclear why ALI has not complied with their signed agreements, and it’s especially worrying that the communities affected by their corporate violence still do not own the lands they’ve been forcibly displaced to. Based on their continued social media presence, however, it’s clear that they refuse to stay silent on what they have suffered from and continue to suffer through.
“Ayala has delivered just a portion of what they committed to,” said Amelia Dela Cruz, president of the Federation of Sicogon Island Farmers Fisherfolks Association (FESIFFA), in an email. “We won’t give up until they fully comply with the agreement they signed and we have been given the titles to our land.”
These residents have had their lives destroyed by natural disaster, then they were further demeaned and humiliated by corporations that sought to prey on them at their lowest. Ayala wants to make this process as difficult as they can for the residents so that they eventually give up. But they demand justice. And so they are trying to get the film out on American screens as soon as possible in order to further pressure Ayala’s shareholders before their annual stock meeting in May, hopefully so that they promptly follow through on the rest of their agreements.
For massive conglomerates like Ayala, it appears that meaningful progress only comes when they are faced with public pressure and the possibility of negative press; that’s all they seem to care about.
This is from the viral post on Asog’s Instagram page that features the testimonies of those who were unable to see the film due to its tickets being blocked off.
Do not let the struggles of these displaced residents be erased by vile corporate greed. Remember this violence. Resist it. Refuse to forget what happened to the residents of Sicogon Island. They’re not the only victims of violent corporate land grabbing across the country. They’re just one example of a decades-long pattern of inhumane forced displacements by property giants like Ayala Land, Inc. But these residents were fortunate to have passionate artists behind them. Hundreds of millions of pesos have been paid for reparations because of Asog and the social media attention it received. The film has literally saved lives. And it was made with a production crew of only six people on a microbudget. This is proof that art matters; that independent films matter. We must support the power of cinema to enact meaningful change in our society. Nothing else is more important in our development as a conscientious Filipino film community. We cannot let this pass.
‘Asog’ will finally make its limited theatrical debut in the United States in April at AMC theaters across the country. More information on how to purchase tickets can be found on their website. Film Movement (NYC) is the digital distributor.
The film is filled with interviews conducted in 2004 in the midst of the Second Intifada, during which over 3,000 Palestinians were killed. One of the interviewees is a friend who was sent to prison for six and half years during the First Intifada. He describes his issues with border police over the years who continue to accuse him of being a terrorist. Another is his grandmother, who was forced to flee her home in Jaffa as a child during the 1948 Nakba. Of the around 120,000 people living there at the time, they estimate that only around 3,000 remained. In his grandmother’s words, most of them wanted to leave because they “were scared like everyone else [as] the Israelis were shooting Palestinians.” When they returned, their house was completely destroyed and they were instead relocated into the home of another exiled family. Narratives like these bore holes into the standard Israeli narrative that the 1948 expulsion was more of a migration, as the Arabs were the ones who chose to leave. Yes, she said they technically did leave, but it didn’t sound like any of them had a meaningful choice. The alternative was death.
We also learn a lot about their everyday lives and how they feel treated by the Israeli state. A man from Ramle complains that over the years less and less of the local businesses have remained in their hands, as they have been replaced by Jewish immigrants from Iraq, Turkey, and even Russia. They’re able to take control of the area “as long as they are Jews and not Arabs,” while the Arabs left behind have been made “useless.” In another conversation, a female law student describes her experience living in Jerusalem as feeling that “people react as if they don’t know we live in this country, as if they were afraid.”
The film was released two years before Israel would conduct one of its most brutal attacks against the Palestinians, Operation Cast Lead. In 2008, over a hundred thousand civilians were displaced in Gaza over the course of three weeks. At the time, this was one of the most violent events in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has since been eclipsed by Operation Protective Edge in 2014, and overwhelmingly so by the current invasion of Gaza.
In order to better understand what’s going on today, it is important to educate ourselves on the perspectives of those who are most affected in the region. And since the Arabs living in Israel are being used rhetorically as a defense for the nation’s horrendous actions, it’s imperative that we take the time to hear from these citizens directly. Although this documentary is almost two decades old, the conflict has been going on for much longer, and so it is still a fantastic place to start to help broaden our understanding of their tragic situation.
Every month the Beirut-based nonprofit Aflamuna streams for free on their website, https://www.aflamuna.online, selected Arabic films with English subtitles. The Roof is currently available to watch there until May, 23, 2024.
