Balangiga: Howling Wilderness is a 2017 Filipino independent film by director Khavn dela Cruz. It was entered in the 5th QCinema International Film Festival and garnered Best Picture there, as well as winning many more awards at other film festivals and competitions like those of FAMAS (Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences) and Gawad Urian.
Set during the Philippine-American War—a largely forgotten or ill-known, though recently coming to light, colonial war—the film gets the first half of its name from the town of Balangiga, in Samar province, part of the Visayas islands in the central Philippines. This town is remembered as one of the flashpoints in said war as the site of the bloody Balangiga Massacre
in September 1901, when Filipino Revolutionary troops and civilian supporters killed several American soldiers—which invited violent retaliation from American forces, both actual and attempted. The second half of the title, "Howling Wilderness", is in fact a direct quote from General Jacob H. "Hell-Roaring Jake" Smith—in charge of the U.S. army's Samar campaign, and who also infamously threatened to "kill every native over ten"—over the paranoia that children that young could be potential insurgents or rebels ("insurrectos", in the commonly used term at the time).
Unlike many other Filipino Period Pieces which tend to be directly Biopics or Based on a True Story, Balangiga is spare in its telling, not quite what would be considered "cinematic" or "theatrical", and largely fictional, in that its cast are not based on any named Real Life people or Historical Domain Characters. In fact, the Minimalist Cast does not even include any known revolutionary heroes, generals, intellectuals or leaders—only a very average, poor, rural, peasant duo: an old farmer and his eight-year-old grandson. The staid and slow-paced film follows young Kulas, his Apoy Buroy, and their carabao (water buffalo) Marcela on a lengthy and gruelling trip across the Samar hinterlands to escape the Americans' harsh, scorched-earth policies. Along the way, they pick up an even smaller toddler, whom Kulas quickly warms up to, despite initially calling him patiyanak ("demon baby") because he was found abandoned and smeared black with grime and soot, bearing an imagined resemblance to the said mythological creature. Apart from this, the film comes off as fairly surreal at times, splicing in other scenes not directly related to the main plot that suggest dreams, memories, parallel events happening elsewhere on the island, or even strange visions.
In early 2021, Balangiga premiered on Asian Netflix, one of a growing selection there of primarily non-Tagalog Filipino movies; its principal language is Waray, the common if now neglected native language in the Samar region, and also the name given to the region's ethnolinguistic community.
Compare Amigo, a 2010 joint American/Filipino indie film set a year earlier, in 1900 and on an average small, Tagalog-speaking Luzon town that gets suddenly occupied by American troops and whose chief has to balance between quartering them and aiding the Revolutionary forces.
Tropes included:
- America Takes Over the World: Why they're in the Philippines in the first place. America's joined the ranks of Western colonial powers, and the brutal reality of this trickles down to even the poor sods trying to fight or escape their wrath.
- Canis Latinicus: It's a bit of a Freeze-Frame Bonus, but the babaylan or spirit medium about halfway in has what vaguely seem like Latinesque inscriptions on his podium. Truth in Television that these rural spiritual leaders, descended as a class from precolonial ritualists who communicated with native deities and well-known for mounting sporadic revolts throughout Spanish and American rule, would infuse their ritual spells with mixtures of Latin-sounding and Spanish-sounding words or syllables (not to mention their native languages), but which put together wouldn't necessarily make logical sense as conventional languages.
- Crapsack World: The vast rural Samar hinterlands in wartime, with virtually nothing to eat, unpredictable and sometimes foul weather, and all manner of life-threatening risks like disease and exposure, not to mention armed U.S. colonial troops.
- Death of a Child: Bola, the little toddler, doesn't make it, and Kulas ends up burying him at the water's edge. It's anyone's guess whether Kulas himself ultimately survives, either.
- Disappeared Dad: Not surprisingly, the Americans killed Kulas' father, presumably in direct battle but not improbably as a victim of their abuses.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Vietnam tends to come to mind. This war is in fact often referred to as "the first Vietnam".
- During the War
- Eagle Land: Largely Type 2. The sole American who shows up in this film, with no lines, is a renegade, long-haired, mud-stained soldier whose first action of course is to level a rifle at Kulas and Bola the little toddler, and he slaughters their carabao for food and orders Kulas to dance around to the tune of his harmonica. On a wider scale, of course, the whole business with American troops invading the Philippines in the first place, which makes them …
- Evil Colonialist: Indirectly, of course; it's the Americans' ferocious tactics of burning or killing all native crops, livestock and other food supplies that denies the Filipino revolutionaries any ability to support themselves in this punishing war, by this point well into guerrilla-warfare mode, and forces even poor peasants and other civilians to flee their homes and migrate for mere survival. More specifically the American soldier who frequently aims his rifle at the two children, kills their carabao for meat, and prods Kulas into dancing to his harmonica tunes—like the little brown monkeys to which Americans often compared Filipinos in general.
- Gratuitous English: One surreal dream sequence echoes out an American taunting the Filipinos with racial slurs and singing the war ditty "Damn, Damn, Damn the Filipinos", but only in audio.
- Holiday in Cambodia: It's a remote, rural Southeast Asian tropical hinterland setting, and with American forces laying waste to the countryside, is also not coincidentally seen as a proto-Vietnam.
- It's Always Sunny at Funerals: When Bola finally dies, Kulas buries him in broad daylight, the sun literally shining behind him and in full glare of the camera. Averted earlier with Apoy Buroy, who was buried on a cloudy day in the forest.
- Latin Land: Largely in the loosest sense of the word, despite the Philippines having just left 300+ years of Spanish rule. The named characters' nicknames or everyday names are presumed derived from Spanish full names, and they're most likely nominally or legally Catholic, but likely only other Filipinos, particularly those with reasonable knowledge of their history, would immediately grasp this at first. There are ruins of apparent Catholic churches or belfries, however; Kulas once sleeps in the shadow of a church bell, and one of the surreal cutscenes depicts an entire naked family hiding under a massive bell. Also, the anting-anting or amulet of Apoy Buroy is shaped like a cross even despite its use in a much more indigenised belief system, and the babaylan or spirit medium in one scene mixes in Latin and Hispanic-derived wording into his chants, as well as on the art painted on his podium.
- Minimalist Cast: A boy, his grandpa, another boy, a babaylan or spirit medium, an American soldier … that's about it, unless companion animals like the carabao count, plus extras playing other fleeing civilians.
- Missing Mom: Kulas and Apoy Buroy set out to find their mutual relation, the former's mother and the latter's daughter, in a far-off but hopefully safer community, but it's never shown if Kulas (and only Kulas—Apoy Buroy dies before the film's midpoint) makes it.
- Period Piece: Set during the height of the Philippine-American War, specifically in the aftermath of the historical Balangiga Massacre of 1901.
- Retraux: The film is shot in an old, 4:3 aspect ratio, and has a grainy, desaturated, often overexposed and scan-lined quality, evoking old videotaped documentaries or TV reportage in The '80s.
- Slice of Life: In many ways the film is, well, a slice of wartime civilian life, focusing on a small group of peasants simply struggling to survive amidst all the war's dangers and risks, both direct and collateral.
- War Is Hell: And they needn't even be combatants to experience this. The war hits just as hard for civilians: American scorched-earth offensives, tropical diseases, unpredictable weather, famine; dying of starvation, illness or exposure was in actual fact much likelier than dying in battle against the Americans or even via execution or direct abuse.
