Film Review: Orapronobis

©

 1989 Bernadette Associates International

 & Special People Productions

Activists are not terrorists. This should be an obvious thing, but government administrations and officials have, for probably the entirety of modern history, labelled them as such because governments and their military forces do not like to be held accountable for their actions. Most recently, we can see examples of this in the Duterte administration's Anti-Terror Act that seeks to broaden the definition of who terrorists are (and to reduce the inherent rights that every human being has in the process), in the United States of America where protesters of police brutality has been abused and arrested by the law enforcement officers who are sworn to protect them, and in Hong Kong where the population there is fighting against a general takeover by Mainland China.

Governments do not like to be questioned, especially by the people they are ruling over.

In the post-People Power environment, a lot of Filipinos slowly learned that, even if they have gotten rid of the scumbag dictator that declared Martial Law and killed thousands of innocent lives while plundering the coffers of his country, nothing has fundamentally changed overall. The same cronies who were in power before are still in power now, and the Lady in Yellow Cory Aquino has just as much of an iron fist as the scumbag she toppled. Sure, now we have some freedom of speech and freedom to protest, but she's still silencing critics and killing protesters like her predecessor--just in a lesser scale. (Remember that the Mendiola Massacre happened a year after the People Power revolution supposedly freed people).

So when director Lino Brocka made the 1989 film Orapronobis (known as Fight For Us in English-speaking countries), the Aquino administration banned the film from release in the country, and the film had to premiere instead in France as an out of competition film in the Cannes Film Festival. Watching the film, it gets obvious why: the film is an effective calling-out of the government's bully ways, one that foregoes a didactic "good-versus-evil" story in favor of showing us the consequences of a protracted revolution that only benefits the ruling class.

The story of Orapronobis is simple: There's a human rights activist played by Phillip Salvador who goes to the province he hid in during the Martial Law era to investigate a government-backed vigilante group, the Orapronobis, whose leader is played by veteran character actor Bembol Roco. There, he uncovers secrets, both personal and linked to the government, that forces him out of the peaceful existence that he's been living in since the scumbag dictator has been deposed.

This is a skillfully-made film, and it gets down to the question it wants to explore quite quickly. Everything is established rather quickly, from the peaceful existence of former activists in the city post-People Power, to the continuing terror of the Orapronobis gang all across the land. It's a film that explores the frightening aspect of privatizing the military power of the government, showing all the abuses that giving military might and leeway would give to influence-hungry groups all across the nation.

It still resonates right now because, frankly, the Police and Military of the Philippines and of many pseudo-and-not-so-pseudo-authoritarian states across the world have made it their mission to terrorize innocent civilians. And the governments of people like Duterte and Trump have made it their life's mission to give more power, and absolve officers of their crimes, as a way of buying their loyalty for the present and the future.

Orapronobis is not a prescient film. From the beginning of governments, there have always been those ready to use the power given to them as a way of taking control of the world. Art like this has not changed anyone's minds--but it can remind people of what we're fighting for and its importance. The revolution only succeeds if everyone is equal, if no one, no minority is left in the lurch picking up the scraps of others' performative heroism.

The film was shown in the Philippines eventually, and it's popular enough that it was shown in my class as an analysis of my country's socio-political landscape. I had a lot of thoughts about it, but the basic idea of what I felt came down to a Jay Z lyric: "Moral victories is for minor league coaches," meaning that change can't be just a moral, token victory, or else no change will really happen for the people who need it.

Why do we fight for the activists in the world? Because they're the ones making sure that moral victories become real victories for those who need it.

This isn't one of Brocka's more famous films, but it certainly is one of the gutsiest.