11,103 film on Martial Law survivors screens in NYC, triggers harrowing memories
By Marivir Montebon
New York - An elderly Filipina was ushered by her friend outside the San Damiano Hall of the St. Francis of Assisi Church in the city as she watched 11,103, a film of Martial Law survivors in the Philippines. She was sobbing and said she couldn't continue watching.
Harrowing memories of Martial Law, a Marcos legacy, came rushing back during the NYC screening on July 27, 2023. People teared up listening to the accounts of the survivors. Massacres, torture, rape. It was not for the faint of heart.
The 90 minute film is directed by Jeannette Ifurung and Mike Alcazaren and produced by Kara Magsanoc-Alicpala.
An impressive turn-out at the San Damiano Hall of the St. Francis of Assisi Church in the city.
One of the featured survivors recounted his torture and detention in the hands of the Philippine Constabulary and the death of his two brothers in Ifugao. Looking back, he said, he would do it again despite the pain - resist the dictatorship.
President Ferdinand Marcos (father of current president Ferdinand Marcos Jr.) imposed Martial Law in the Philippines in 1972, to quash communist takeover of the government. The military regime however resulted in massive terrorism in the cities and rural areas with corruption and cronyism in government. In 1986, Marcos was deposed by a people uprising (known as EDSA people’s uprising) and military coup d'etat. He and his family fled to Hawaii to escape persecution.
The Philippine government identified 75,730 survivors of ML but only 11,103 have been successfully vetted.
The 11,103 Martial Law survivors were given reparations compensation of an average of $1500 each, carved from the $200 million recovery of some of the Marcos ill-gotten wealth from the Swiss Bank. Despite the long arduous effort (one decade of litigation and one decade of legislation), this was a measly amount that could never compensate for the loss of lives and future of those affected.
Survivor Fr. Edicio de la Torre had said in the film, the reparations compensation doesn't matter but the recognition that indeed, there was a brutal Martial Law in the Philippines.
Conversations after the screening with (L-R) Atty. Ruben Carranza, Ninotchka Rosca, Gina Apostol, and Charina Nadura. Marivir Montebon moderated the panel. (Photo by Nieva V. Quezon)
Novelist Gina Apostol being interviewed by FilAm Press Club president Don Tagala of ABS-CBN.
Human rights activists shared their thoughts after the screening: former PCGG commissioner Ruben Carranza, activist novelist and Martial Law survivor Ninotchka Rosca, novelist Gina Apostol, and journalist Charina Nadura.
Carranza reminisced the steep battle he had to go through at the PCGG to recover money from the Swiss Bank, for instance, to include tedious paper trailing and political maneuvers. He is a former Commissioner in the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) who oversaw the recovery of the $680 million ill-gotten Swiss bank deposits of the Marcos family and then drafted the law that used $200 million of that recovered amount to fund the state-run reparations program for Marcos dictatorship victims for the Memorialization Commission. Carranza is presently a Senior Expert at the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York.
Rosca cited the need for continued vigilance and to avoid the politics of compromise, especially at this time when Marcos Jr. is the incumbent president.
A novelist, journalist, organizer and activist, Rosca was imprisoned for six months in a military detention camp during the Marcos dictatorship. She led the foundation for the creation of a Philippine women’s mass solidarity network and then helped launch a national women’s organization involved in transnational feminist theory and practice. Her writing has appeared in publications all over the world and translated into several languages. She works with the women’s organization, AF3IRM.
Apostol said there's a need to ‘forgive ourselves now that the Marcoses are back in power.’ There is a systemic pattern by the enemy that divides and decimates people, and people must be aware of that, she said.
Apostol is an award-wining novelist. Her debut novel, Bibliolepsy, set in Manila during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos won the 1997 Philippine National Book Award for Fiction as well as her second novel, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, in 2010. Her American debut, Gun Dealers’ Daughter won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award, and her novel, Insurrecto, was one of Publishers Weekly’s 2018 Ten Best Books.
For Nadura, the story of militarism should be told again and again, especially to the youth, to be able to defend democracy and freedom. She is a TV Production Manager at Democracy Now!, an award-winning daily global news hour hosted by journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. A graduate of Broadcast Journalism from CUNY Brooklyn College, Nadura has worked with Bill Moyers and Al Jazeera. The Brooklyn mom to Artchan and Amihan was born and raised in Aklan, Philippines.
Charina Nadura (middle) with son Artchan and Lora Nicolas Olaes, one of the producers of Here Lies Love on Broadway. Contrary to Carranza’s opinion, HLL opens up the truth about the Marcoses, confides Olaes, to this writer after the 11,103 NYC screening.
Dakila’s Alex Poblete, Fr. Julian Jagudilla, writer Marivir Montebon, the screening’s moderator, and Mona Lisa Yuchengco, publisher of Positively Filipino magazine
The screening was brought together by Dakila, Story tellers, Pinas, Active Vista, AF3IRM NYC, Malaya Movement, and the Fil-Am Press Club of New York through the initiative of Mona Lisa Yuchengco, publisher of Positively Filipino magazine.
It was one courageous act of Filipinos in the diaspora. But being sparse, the one-time summer event paled in contrast to the extravaganza of Here Lies Love on Broadway, which trivializes the Marcos dictatorship, opined Atty. Carranza.# #alwaysremember
