Tondo, Beloved

History inches through the pain of living within the gaps and seams of Manila’s old international port. "Tondo, Beloved" is a filmic depiction of the underlying hostilities between life and landscape in the in the expanding international port of Manila. Four lives unfold in micro-narratives of birth, youth, adulthood and death, a chronic struggle in poor communities squeezed within the gaps and seams of the port’s industrial spaces. The vast industrial landscape blankets them -- an artery of the global economy, full of its own life but unheeding of the nearest surrounding cycle of misery. The landscape is of Tondo, one of country's oldest extant districts, site of the main international trading port and home to hundreds of thousands of Manila’s migrant poor. Day in and day out, the local arbiters of the global economy surge through Tondo, the intensifying clanging of steel evoking junctions of remembrance. With the dead strewn by the wayside, what is interrogated is national birth -- bleak images that point to periods in history when Tondo’s people fought for nation, for land and for homes.

Producer / Production Details

Jewel Maranan and Vanessa Ulgado / CINEMA IS INCOMPLETE / Philippines