I unveiled, for the first time, my independently produced i-doc titled Obrero to a roomful of overseas Filipino workers (OFW) attending my film screening in New Zealand. The i-doc forms part of my multiplatform documentary that tells of the story of Filipino rebuild workers migrating in Christchurch after the 2011 earthquake. Rushing to describe and define what an i-doc was, I told my audience: “it looks like a website, but it feels like a film”. I then spent the next couple of minutes showing fragments of my i-doc and uncovering the documentary contents hiding beyond its interface. At that point, it seemed like my i-doc had finally met its first audience.
Documentary as an art form and a genre is historically marginalised by cinema’s commercial imperative. Thanks to the resurgence of political documentaries in recent past (e.g. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, 2004 and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and its sequel, 2006/2017), the audiences have revived their interest in documentary as alternative means of understanding the world. The success of local films such as Baby Ruth Villarama’s Sunday Beauty Queen (2016), Sheron Dayoc’s The Crescent Rising (2015) and many other award-winning documentaries has signalled a dashing hope among struggling independent documentary makers trying to a find their place in a shrinking industry.
Filipino docu origins
Filipinos’ appreciation of documentary can be attributed to the popularity of current affairs news magazine programs aired in commercial media giants in the country. The Probe Team, led by Cheche Lazaro, was one of the early adopters. As an independent outfit, Probe had no permanent home, and it was able to move from one station to another while maintaining its identity and branding. Its model of distribution is called block timing or brokered programming, in which network owners sell airtime to independent producers. Soon after, television companies began forming in-house production teams creating home-grown rather than outsourced documentary contents. Due to broader reach of television, Filipinos today commonly associate the documentary genre with news magazine format often hosted by a journalist or a personality and akin to long-form news reporting.
But the documentary genre had reached the Philippine soil long before Probe. In 1917, Jose Nepomuceno and his brother Jesus started producing newsreels for American and European news film outlets through their independent production house Malayan Motion Pictures (read Nepomuceno makes documentaries by Joe Quirino). A newsreel is a short film showing current events, personalities and other topics of interest, and is considered an earlier variant of documentary. We didn’t have a notion of documentary then as the genre was still emerging in countries such as Britain and the Soviet Union. Many years after, Filipinos rekindled their interest in ‘Third cinema’ filmmaking through Kidlat Tahimik’s first-person radical films. His most popular film Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare, 1977), a mixture of fable, biography, documentary and avant-garde, challenged the Filipino colonial mentality and resisted the dominance of Western influence on our local culture. Many international critics celebrated it as a refreshing film practice combining politics and aesthetics.
Despite accolades and acclaim, independent documentaries outside television circuits are relatively unknown to Filipino mass audience. Today, our local talents are combing festivals and pitching fora overseas in search of funding and distribution opportunities. A few initiatives in the Philippines that support filmmakers through production grants have emerged in recent past such as SineSaysay Documentary Film Lab and festival venues such as QCinema and Active Vista, among others. We still have a long way to go before we elevate the independent documentary culture in the country, but these platforms contribute to the re-emergence of documentary in the Filipino public sphere.
Interactive documentaries (i-docs)
Given my shoe-string budget, my independently produced i-doc offers only basic graphics, interface and moving images. But a web documentary can reach an audience outside the festival circuit and can enjoy an expanded life span online. It can also effectively represent, explain and humanise a complex political and cross-border issue. As a result, we see a new breed of filmmakers who now collaborate with multimedia artists, web designers and computer coders in crafting a new mode of documentary storytelling.
Although a distinct form of media, i-docs retain the purposes of conventional documentaries – to persuade, record, educate and provoke social change. Scholar Michael Renov labels these purposes as ‘modalities of desire’. I-docs also investigate social dilemmas (e.g. Journey to the End of the Coal, 2009), promote a social cause (e.g. The Big Issue, 2009), depict a slice of reality (e.g. Out my window, 2010) and represent the voiceless in the society (e.g. The Quipu Project, 2014). Because the field is open for experimentation, i-docs’ style and aesthetics vary from one to another. Some i-docs are game-like and immersive while others allow the audience to play a role while navigating the story. Unlike a traditional film with a beginning, middle and end, i-docs are non-linear and flexible, giving users more control in content navigation.
Critics say that giving the audience too much control in navigating a web platform is detrimental to story coherence. Others raise technical limitations, poor retention and the need for higher bandwidth to successfully interact with web-based media. Indeed, these are legitimate concerns that highlight the vulnerability of i-docs as a sustainable documentary format. But we have always been skeptical about emerging forms of media practice. Practitioners didn’t take Facebook seriously when it was born in 2004 or YouTube in 2005. And we initially looked down on new media as platform for serious journalism until they became too popular and influential to be ignored.
Conventional documentaries are here to stay, and i-doc is meant to complement and not to compete against established norms. Whatever format, style and fashion, documentary assumes an important role in a democracy. It addresses you not as an individual but as a citizen in our society. This is an opportune time for Filipino creative practitioners to experiment on new platforms and for film-funding entities to give i-docs a try. Given the limited exhibition opportunities for independent documentaries in the Philippines, the open distribution model of i-docs could flourish in a fast-changing media environment. After all, what digitization affords us is an equal playing field – amateurs and experienced filmmakers, from rich and developing countries, can now engage new audiences and represent reality in ways unimaginable before.
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A version of this article is published in Rappler.
Image source: Don Jose and the Early Philippine Cinema by Joe Quirino (1983)
Also check out my other article Do-it-yourself interactive documentary (i-doc): A post-textual analysis. Media Practice and Education. DOI
thoughts about documentary, media and journalism 