Filmmaker Isabel Sandoval stars in the Filipino auteur's exploration of the origins of regional feudalism, which gradually builds to an immersive vision of the mayhem and mundanity of colonial cruelty. Set almost a century after Magellan first landed on the Philippine Archipelago, and coming just a year after “Magellan,” director Lav Diaz‘s last film, landed in Cannes, “Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors” is a description of bruised history rendered in the sharp, precise, scarring lines of a newly inked tattoo. In many ways a companion piece to “Magellan”‘s epic, full-color demythologization of the Portuguese explorer’s legacy, but in others a convex-mirror inversion that unfolds in crisp monochrome and embeds itself within the experiences of the everyday oppressed, “Ancestors” weaponizes the beauty of its setting in the seething, untameable jungles of Luzon island, against the ugliness of the newly unleashed colonial spirit of acquisition, exploitation and subjugation.
Diaz lets the story uncoil slowly; disasters of this magnitude rarely happen in a hurry. It is 1617 and Padre Enciso (Bart Guingona) has been deputized to “civilize” this part of the island by his Spanish masters who, many years since, have claimed the territory for King and Catholicism. Nominally a holy man but fond of his deeply impious extracurriculars, the Padre is admired by some locals, feared by many more and challenged by none.
He desires to build a church in a small clearing in the jungle, and to that end has sent out several expeditions to retrieve supplies. Many of the men thus sent have perished on these arduous indentured-servitude errand-runs, from illness or exhaustion or at the tip of a poisoned arrow in one of the frequent raids by bandit Bari Bari (Yul Servo). The village women speak of Bari Bari in superstitious terms as they gossip at their gathering place by the river — despite the formalist rigor of Diaz’s approach, the dialogue here is fluid and natural and full of lived-in banter.
Having essentially killed many of these women’s husbands, the Padre has been quick to bed the widows, often impregnating them. Drinking coconut alcohol with Alejo Smith (Daniel Palisa), the architect sent from Manila to design the church, Enciso waxes loquacious about how he’s surprised none of the children he has fathered with these “monkeys” has been born with a tail, and about the probability that Spain will go to war with England. Dungwen (Christian Bables) is the adult offspring of one of Padre Enciso’s couplings — the women call it visiting, the men call it fucking, we would call it rape.
But Dungwen refuses to acknowledge his mestizo (mixed-race) heritage despite the advantages that Spanish parentage might bring. Whether out of injured pride at this rejection of his paternity, or just plain old spite, Padre Enciso is insistent that Dungwen lead the next expedition, this time to pick up marble for the church altar. Dungwen has no choice but to go, yet really just wants to be left alone to provide for his wife and daughters — two young girls who are clearly being raised to respect the old ways.
Also part of the old world and resisting Christian conversion, Babayeng Indimatadog (Isabel Sandoval) is a traveling healer. A grave, stately woman who traverses the region with her brother Himamat (Ronnie Lazaro) ringing a bell to alert locals to her presence, Babayeng is mid-healing ritual when the Padre’s men take her and throw her in a makeshift cell. Any refusal to conform to the new Catholic colonialist order is interpreted as dissent.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
