i.

Here, Here explores the many orientations of loss without forgetting remedy. It begins with a plea—“aray, Ma!”—and holds a coexistence of ache and cure throughout. Abrasions grow scabs, the tormented weep, clogged ears may heal, and abused geographies will recover. 

After starting with Koi’s individual pain, Here, Here escalates to traverse communal agonies. Its domesticity is swiftly inscribed within a rural landscape victim to a massive mining operation. We are immediately confronted with the characters’ personal situations and the political context they occupy. And the film’s visual and sonic fluctuations fluently accommodate its precarious ecosystem. 

With her close merging of subtle experimentation and terse script, Joanne Cesario creates a comprehensive yet nebulous navigation of Here, Here’s concerns. Personal and current pains are placed within the context of historic political crises on land; tragedies inherent to our semi-colonial, semi-feudal society. The film remains decongested too as it asserts a remedy that is at once personal and universal. Its tenderness renders the violent narrative, the lacerations raw throughout.

 

ii. 

Before the film reveals the circumstances of Koi and his mother Tonet, it presents a scene of nocturnal peace. An overhead shot shows Tonet sound asleep while Koi lies beside her, unable to rest. His countenance discloses a disturbance, or a semblance of it, just enough to interrupt the calm within the moonlit curtains and mosquito net around the frame. Koi, yellowed by the lamp, pulls on the white, diaphanous drapes; a composed tension taut and heavy within. Here, Here maximizes this method of prefacing misery with the ardently beautiful, soliciting profound grief from the viewers.

The escalation happens the following morning in a brief exchange about the missing father. While sewing, Tonet assures the empty dining area that her sturdy husband, impregnable to falling rocks, survived the tunnel accident. She tries to fortify this optimism by turning to Koi to convey a lamentation of his frail posture. However, this only exposes the fissures of that optimism.

Upon hearing this projected anxiety, Koi’s ear falters again. A curious moment unfolds as Tonet arbitrarily asks about remembering and the weather: “Naalala mo nung kumikidlat diyan sa labas?” But her words could not pierce the dull rumble and muffled screech clogging his ears. Through short, calibrated scenes, the film confirms its opening hint that the organ’s affliction connects to deeper illnesses. 

A barong tagalog, the object of Tonet’s needlework, further conveys her brittle hope of her husband’s survival. And the following scene reinforces this: Koi stands in his room made heavy by the pile of boxes of his father’s possessions. His shoulders seem to bear the weight of the space slowly collapsing.

 

iii. 

Here, Here completes its exposition through stratified casualties. An act opens with a shot of an actual mining site: OceanaGold’s gray butchery amid lush greens, a slaughterhouse still in operation. Mount Dinkiday was replaced by a calcified hollow; massive excavations have eviscerated its terrain.

The film was able to place the mining company OceanaGold in the narrative as an invisible villain, an infection indexed by its mutilations on geography1. It emerges as the root of the characters’ agonies that also extends across populations, across histories. Indeed, beyond their injuries is a famished community deprived of land, rivers, and harvest. 

Under exploitative societies, individual pain is inevitably communal, losses are shared. And so, a collective approach too is necessary to upend this exploitation. Like a march, or a barricade, and something else.

 

iv. 

Here, Here summarizes the land crisis into human scale with ferocious clarity.

In an abused forest under the blazing sun, on a bed of weeds surrounded by thickets and lean trees, Den-Den and Koi sat together silently. They resisted familiar affections, and tried to contain desires that get more determined with each moment. Or Den-Den awaits as Koi hesitates. The tension is briefly relieved when he asks about her wounds. 

And in this scene, the film deploys a most effective maneuver: Den-Den whispers the abrasions on her skin, recalling their provenances, touching their coordinates. Along her soft enumerations, the shots alternate between dry scabs and coarse epidermis and the mining site—the gray hollow still being excavated. Heavy machines violate the primordial land and tender skin, hauling away rocks and flesh, soil and blood. She is the injured geography. 

 

v. 

The film concludes with Tonet examining Koi’s ear. The scene evokes the cave-like formation at the beginning; darkness, stark light, muted rumbling. His ache persists, and she still looks for her husband in that infected tunnel on her lap. Meanwhile, OceanaGold continues its operations with an expired license and thirteen environmental violations. Legislative and martial aid from the national government had made this possible2. The suffering restarts. 

However, tucked within the cycle is a cure; the film remembers a remedy. It places a fundamental yet most difficult solution to Oceanagold’s vast powers. And Den-Den leads us to this cure. When she takes Koi into the forest to look for a medicinal plant, note that she finds it on the ground, and somewhere beyond.

Her gaze towards us makes us that phantom plant. And she lingers long enough to make sure we understand: our participation is the cure. 

The mining company is a comprehensive embodiment of consolidated powers abusing the populace. It is a remorseless, gluttonous tyrant that exists beyond the filmic narrative, spilling actual blood. Through the synthesis of Den-Den’s gaze and OceanaGold’s actuality, the film conveys its plea: If collective sufferings are functions of abusive systems, then the only remedy is an organized, consolidated mass movement.

 

1.Aaron Macaraeg, "OceanaGold’s Wealth is Misery for Kasibu Farmers," Bulatlat, 27 August 2019, https://www.bulatlat.com/2019/08/24/oceanagolds-wealth-is-misery-for-kasibus-farmers. 

 

2. Aaron Macaraeg, "Didipio Residents Stage Barricade as OceanaGold Continues Operation sans License," Bulatlat, 4 July 2019, https://www.bulatlat.com/2019/07/03/didipio-residents-stage-barricade-as-oceanagold-continues-operation-sans-license.