Organizer: Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU, NYU KJCC, International Filipino Association at NYU, and NYSEAN
Type/Location: In person / New York
Description:
Palawan has attracted international renown as one of the world’s most spectacularly beautiful and ecologically diverse islands. But for a small network of environmental crusaders and vigilantes trying to protect its natural resources, it is more akin to a battlefield. Delikado follows four members of this network and their companions as they risk their lives trying to stop rapacious businessmen, loggers, and politicians from destroying this Philippine and world heritage.
Palawan’s Indigenous Peoples have through millennia, before the world discovered Palawan’s supernal beauty, learned to harmonize and respect the island’s rich natural resources. As Tagbanua elder Remedios Cabral, featured briefly in the film, says, “The way we natives feel for the land is different. Our feelings are fused with the earth. The earth is like our parent.”
Palawan has gained renown as an international tourist destination in our generation. Travel + Leisure, to cite only one major publication, named it the world’s most beautiful island in 2013, 2016, 2017, and 2020 (and still near the top at second in 2021).
But behind its dramatic cliffs, rainforests, famous beaches, underground river, and diverse wildlife, corrupt businessmen and government officials have been plundering its resources and environment through illegal logging, fishing, and mining. Delikado follows a small band of citizen land defenders trying to stop them.
As the title card at the film’s beginning states: “The island of Palawan… contains one of the oldest, largest and most diverse rainforests in the world. It is also one of the most dangerous places to be a land defender.”
Makalunas and his cameraman Tom Bannigan, follow the land defenders on their risky mission, as they bust illegal loggers and confiscate chainsaws or provide counsel to indigenous tribes threatened and pressured by developers and authorities to give up their ancestral lands. One of the land defenders, Tata Baldasares, recalls how industrial-scale illegal logging in Palawan began, in the 1970s (Martial Law days), when as a soldier, he took part in the despoliation on the orders of military commanders. He was now leading missions to stop illegal logging in an effort to atone for past sins and in hopes that his granddaughter could still experience the beauty of the island that he was now helping to protect.
Bobby Chan, a lawyer and the head of the PNNI (Palawan NGO Network Inc.) recalls how he caught his first chainsaw and surrendered it to the authorities, only to catch it again three months later. He and the PNNI have stopped surrendering confiscated chainsaws to the bribable officials, using these instead as elements in a massive sculpture designed as encouragement for those who would dare defy the plunder. The irony is not lost on them that what naturally is the government’s responsibility of enforcing laws and protecting the environment, ordinary citizens have to carry out themselves.
Nieves Rosento, the then-mayor of El Nido, is an ally of the PNNI. She advocates eco-tourism in contrast to heedless mass tourism that the governor (a cousin of President Duterte’s) and his money-flushed allies are pushing. As Edna Lim, Rosento’s opponent in the mayoral re-election states tersely, she was going for “a boom.”
Rosento, like the PNNI members, gets death threats from various quarters, including President Duterte himself who was wont to threaten political opposition by including their names on the drug lists, thus exposing them to the wave of extra judicial killings that he incited during his drug war. In a chilling scene, Rosento and her family are watching TV when Duterte announces his latest list of drug dealers and users. To their alarm, Duterte reads out Rosento’s name and heaps vulgarities on her all on national TV.
There is much soul-searching among Nieves, Chan, Baldasares, and the small band of para-enforcers when one of their members, “Kap” Ruben Arzaga (to whom the film is dedicated) is killed during one of their missions, just the latest in a country that had become the most dangerous in the world for land defenders. The sight of Kap’s funeral procession, winding against the renowned El Nido backdrop, instead of the usual scantily clad tourists in sybaritic abandon, drives home the gravity of the life-and-death struggle happening behind the idyllic facades.
Family fractures are examined, feelings of helplessness grip Arzaga’s band members. Chan reflects: “My daughter used to be close to me. Now she’s closer to my wife. They have to be relocated to Manila and stay there so that they won’t be in harm’s way. My wife doesn’t want me to do this. The wife of Tata doesn’t want him to do this. All our families don’t want us to do this. But it’s like you have this singularity of purpose that makes your mind clear that this is what you have to do when you wake up in the morning. I’d like to believe it’s grace.”
Finding the strength to persist, Chan and his group decide to resume their work after their period of mourning, fear, and reflection. Chan mulls: “Sometimes, when I hear the critics say we should not do it because people get killed, I know that that is a good argument. I know. But we have to do it because nobody else will.”
Rays of hope and encouragement appear like grace towards the film’s end when Chan visits the choking urban sprawl of Manila to speak at a climate change conference organized by the international human and climate rights group Global Witness. Here, Chan receives affirmation of his group’s work and partakes in initiatives that seek to protect land defenders in Palawan and around the world. Solidarity is reaffirmed with other environmental workers whose lives are at risk elsewhere in the Philippines, South America and other parts of the world. Out in the clogged streets, youth from diverse regions of the country hold rallies for climate and environmental protection.
Delikado ensures that humble heroes like Tata Baldasares and Kap Arzaga are no longer unsung. And it focuses eloquently on the need to protect not only the land but even more urgently in vital parts of the world’s heritage, the land defenders themselves.
Karl Malakunas is an Australia-born filmmaker and journalist who has been based in Asia — covering environmental issues, conflict, natural disasters and political upheavals — for two decades. Karl is the Asia-Pacific Deputy-Editor-In-Chief for Agence France-Presse based in Hong Kong. He is a Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program Fellow and a recipient of the SFFILM Vulcan Productions Environmental Fellowship. After living in the Philippines for eight years while working as Manila Bureau Chief for AFP, Karl has drawn on his experiences, contacts and deep inside knowledge of the country to make Delikado, his first feature film. His environmental reporting around the world has included covering the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, the aftermath of Super Typhoon Haiyan in the eastern Philippines, and the coal-powered rise of China’s economy.
Leni Velasco is the co-founder and Secretary General of DAKILA, an artist-activist collective in the Philippines, and the Executive Director of its Active Vista Center. She is part of the Innovation for Change – Global Governance Circle representing its East Asia Hub and the Board of Directors of the Albay Arts Foundation. She served as Festival Director of the Active Vista International Human Rights Film Festival which organizes social impact film screenings integrating advocacy campaigns on human rights concerns, bringing films to wider audiences to engage them to make strategic actions towards meaningful social change. Leni specializes in advocacy communications, social movement building, and creative campaigning work. She has been a fellow of the Equitas Human Rights Training Program in Montreal, the Summer School of Cinema Human Rights Advocacy in Venice, the Cinema without Borders Program of Movies that Matter in Amsterdam, the Release Southeast Asia Fellowship on Drug Reform Policy in London, and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation International Academy for Leadership in Germany. In 2018, she was nominated for Most Distinguished Human Rights Defender at the Ignite Awards of Amnesty International.
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