Perchance to Dream

Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria (The Dream of Eleuteria, 2010)
D: Remton Siega Zuasola
S: Donna Isidora Gimeno, Lucia Juezan, Gregg Tecson

The evident poverty in the country in tandem with the attendant shadow of the Filipino diaspora has proven to be rich if a tad overworked fodder for Philippine cinema. An adopted notion of efficacy among local filmmakers is seemingly that, in an attempt to create a clear path towards patent social relevance while ensuring a certain degree of audience acceptance invariably involving the build-up and resolution of conflicts both within and without their central characters, they need only think of the great potential for personal and familial melodrama found in the plight of the overseas Filipino.

Indeed, the timeline of contemporary Philippine cinema is sporadically dotted with the likes of The Flor Contemplacion Story, American Adobo, Milan, and Caregiver. Such films are constitutionally well-intentioned, to be sure, but not all of them yield satisfactory results; for every memorable Anak, there’s a forgettable Love Me Again. Remton Siega Zuasola’s 2010 CinemaOne Originals entry, Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria (The Dream of Eleuteria), follows this long line of films, and understandably it contends for the former, preferable adjective, at least from the standpoint of those who have had the pleasure, fortune, and good sense of watching it. Well let me, as someone who has, tell you that Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria is not merely memorable — it is phenomenal.

Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria is a film with a normal running time of 90 minutes, give or take, but with a most unusual structure made up of one long continuous shot — and nothing else. Despite bearing some telltale signs of a production borne along a budget that would make any Scrooge proud — virtually unknown actors, rural shooting locations, handheld camerawork — it ably rivals the technical audacity of Alexander Sokurov’s extravagant, Cannes-feted one-take wonder, Russian Ark. However, to see in Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria but a triumph of ingenuity, a successful experiment in sequence shooting, is to miss its true source of genius, for conveyed along Zuasola’s ambitious cinematic concept is a deeply affecting story of human life and ambition.

Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria is an hour-and-a-half chronicle of an hour and a half in the life of Eleuteria, an unassuming young woman from a poor family, only one of many, in Olango Island, Cebu. The etymology of the title character’s archaic moniker betrays the film’s underlying irony: Eleuteria’s name is a slight variation of the Greek word for freedom, something she surely lacks in life if the short span of the film is anything to go by. Her hometown, on the other hand, portends her fate: Olango Island is somewhat famous for being a sanctuary for migratory birds, of whom Eleuteria will almost certainly, metaphorically be one when the coldest of winters in her forthcoming life abroad and away from home finally sets.

Terya, as she is fondly called, is a mail-order bride set to be married to a wealthy man in Germany, a man she doesn’t know, let alone love. At the behest of her debt-stricken mother, she tacitly agrees to be sent off at the town pier, where she will start her journey to a distant country touted as a land flowing with milk and honey, as opposed to her native island lousy with fish and seaweed. But a more significant journey is the one directly leading to Terya’s imminent departure, the one masterfully shown in its entirety in the film: her hour-and-a-half trek with her mother, father, and younger sister, starting from the river where she attempts to drown herself in protest of her mother’s conscious decision to marry her off to a man she has never met and ending at the pier where she may set forth reluctantly or not at all. In the interim she treads a path alternately strewn with harsh realities and fetching ideals — as serpentine and uncertain as life itself.

Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria borders on the picaresque, with Terya stumbling along her way as she nurses a big lump of indecision in her mind and stumbling upon several notable fellow islanders, each of whom either aggravates or mitigates said lump and at least three of whom are walking contradictions (Terya’s cousin, a nouveaux riche Olango resident who assures Terya of a comfortable life abroad but appears to be in a tight legal battle with her former German partner; her boyfriend, a local fisherman like her father who, like her father, wants her to stay but offers nothing beyond empty promises of love keeping them alive; and her recruiter, an affluent woman who declares assistance to the poor residents of Olango but literally tramples on a mentally challenged but harmless person). Temporally and spatially continuous, Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria never loses its purchase on its intent to present an engaging dialectic between realism and idealism even as it frequently remarks and wisecracks on the current state of things in the Philippines in general and on the exigencies of poverty and educational inadequacy in particular. While a walk through an island barrio seems to promise nothing in the way of narrative movement and everything in the way of sleep-inducing longueurs, the film, propelled to near-perfection by a cast mostly possessed of understated brilliance, brews and sustains a fascinating mixture of drama sans hysterics and comedy sans caricature that makes for an incredibly entertaining and moving portrait of a family and, by expansion, a nation beset by difficulties but never without hope for progress.

Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria may have been just a brief, barely heard bleep on the radar of local cinema, but I hold the belief that its impression on those who have been lucky to see it, myself included, is one of indelible quality. Replete with raw pathos and mordant humor, the film is by turns a tug at the heart and a punch to the kidney, managing to say so much in so short a span. Make no mistake: Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria continues a tradition of films about the immigrant Filipino, but it doesn’t quite belong in the league of those it follows. That’s because Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria is so refreshingly original and deeply resonant as to be a beast all its own.

pelikula