Places and pieces of an imagined republic in Renei Dimla’s ‘Republika ng Pipolipinas’

By John Anthony S. Estolloso

Released last year, ‘Republika ng Pipolipinas’ is a mockumentary of national dimensions. In its own sardonic way, it pushes the territory of documentary narrative into comedy: not entirely something new to the cinema, though something clearly contextualized to a target audience. The film hits home because the satire onscreen is as laughable as the situations we face in the country. If comedy necessitates laughing at the obvious, then the chain of spoofs offered by the film to the viewers constitutes more than fiction. The imagined republic is a farce, but of serious things. It mocks—but in a cynically hopeful way.

There was an earlier screening of Republika last May at Cinematheque Centre Iloilo. Last Saturday, it made an appearance again as part of Places, Pieces, a program of films about locations and memories, prepared by the Film Development Council of the Philippines in partnership with Japan Foundation, in celebration of 70 years of the normalization of post-war Filipino-Japanese relations. Interweaving the locus of territory and remembrance, the screenings at Festive Walk Cinemas offered selections of contemporary local and Japanese films and documentaries, all of which explore how territorialities and their interstices preserve and build memories, and how identities are formed from both.

On that note, Renei Dimla’s film steals the spotlight by handing us a clownish mirror of our times and ourselves.

‘Republika’s plot is absurdly relatable albeit also absurdly bizarre. Disillusioned landowner Cora Vitug — played with all seriousness by Geraldine Villamil — desperately defends her paltry piece of land encroached by a developer hellbent on transforming the agricultural lot into a trash depository. Running out of options, she decides to secede from the Philippine Republic, naming her own republican state as Pipolipinas: the naming an apparent jab at democracy (or its inadequacies?). She stakes out her beleaguered territory and declares it to be sovereign. A live-streamed invective of hers turns viral and people from different sectors of society suddenly take up her call and shower her with support; activists, students, the media, influencers, jeepney drivers, an overly enthusiastic rapper, and Alessandra de Rossi (as herself) ingress into the scene in a dramatic show of solidarity.

This initial enthusiasm bodes promising beginnings for the fledgling utopia. Yet, the imagining of republics is more than mere subdivision of lands or declarations of sovereignty. It requires statehood: peoples, principles, and poetries. As in any political state, the state of things in Pipolipinas bent towards the follies of human nature. One sees the juvenile flair and flavor of social media weaving through the politics, which proves to be both boon and bane in the running of state affairs. Disinformation runs rife through their ranks. The performative trivialities of metaphors and symbols to define national identity usurp realpolitik. In turn, bureaucracy swallows statesmanship in a convoluted drama of opportunism and clout-chasing, where personal interests clamber over public service.

Then again, which of these things have not happened in our politics?

Further into the story, we are introduced to a dubious attempt on corruption by the powers-that-be, something which proves to be the root cause of Cora Vitug’s woes. But things have deteriorated too deeply for her to have any forthcoming redemption. With her secession treated as a joke, she loses everything at the end, and while the lampoon of metaphors alleviates some of the somber gravitas of her predicament, they do little to allay the fact that these happen in reality. We laugh at the iconic neck-brace of officials who run afoul of the law, only to miraculously disappear once the hubbub has settled. We snigger at the unending and unfiltered stream of instantaneous reactions and comments on a live-stream. We marvel at the rickety barricade where they made their final stand with stool, stick, and excreta, defending what they considered rightfully theirs.

There is no happy ending for Cora Vitug. Neither do the rest of the cast get theirs. Some had to grapple with torn loyalties. The rest drift back to their own idiosyncrasies, each to his or her own thing. There is optimism though—the final spectacle of an overhead shot of a flag ceremony closes the final strains of the refrain of the original featured song: tayo ang Bayan. People make the nation, simply that—but perhaps, the lesson came too late for our tragic heroine.

For all its caricaturing and deadpan humor, Dimla’s film takes us through our own lived experiences. We can wince at the apparent allergy of our local cinematic satire to happily-ever-afters, or their penchant to go surreptitiously political. Inescapably, our films tell our stories the way our narrators lived them: whether we like it or not, we too are dramatis personae to the comedy.

(The writer is a humanities teacher in one of the private schools in the city. The poster is from Cinemalaya’s website.)