(IPS) feature

When Filipino director Marilou Diaz-Abaya went on a sabbatical from making films a few years ago, little did she know that it would bring her into the Philippine government's war against Muslim rebels in the south — and right into yet another movie project.

In the end, this movie, Bagong Buwan (New Moon), shown at the Metro Manila Film Festival until early this month, was a voyage of discovery for her, and for her actors as well.

Hopefully, it was the same for local viewers, many of who know very little about Muslims, not to mention the costs of decades of conflict between Muslim separatist rebels and the military in the large southern island of Mindanao.

Mindanao is where most of the three to five million Muslim Filipinos live in this country of 80 million people, the only majority Christian country in south-east Asia.

National identity

Mindanao is also home to decades-long restiveness among Muslim communities, who trace a nationalist identity to the days they resisted Spanish colonial rule that governed most of what later became the Philippines.

Indeed, Diaz-Abaya recalls how some Muslims who helped supervise the film project asked her ''what can you possibly say about us?'' in the movie.

But after a year in Cotabato and Lanao del Sur provinces in Mindanao, and as the then government of President Joseph Estrada ordered all-out war against Muslim separatists in early 2000, she said she wanted badly to do a film on the orphans of war and to say ''this is enough''.

So, Diaz-Abaya was quoted as saying by the local media, she said yes when the wife of a Mindanao-based businessman proposed that she do a film focusing on the children affected by war in the south.

The result is a film that is unique, first in its selection of a non-commercial subject, and second, in its efforts to understand the plight and emotions of Muslim Filipinos amid war.

Costs of war

Despite a sometimes too-obvious play on the contrasts between the Catholic and Muslim faiths, the film shows the human costs of a war that many Filipinos have come to accept as a given situation, one that has no end in sight.

The film's plot revolves around Ahmad, a successful Muslim doctor in the capital Manila who rushes home to Mindanao after his son is shot by a stray bullet during an attack by vigilantes on his village one night.

That is the starting point of efforts led by Ahmad to move civilians in the community out of danger zones, a quest that captures what life become to many Muslim families since the start of Muslim Filipinos' campaign for self-rule — one that has ranged at different points in time from calls for a separate state to political autonomy and for an "Islamic state".

''I have been running away since I was a child,'' as Ahmad's mother says in the film.

If the film is able to show how war destroys societies and inspires interest in the lives and culture of Filipino Muslims — then it probably would have achieved some social impact.

After all, many Filipino Christians know little about the culture and religion of Filipino Muslims — too many know only news reports about clashes and references to the generic term ''Muslim rebels''.

Political infighting

In truth, the Muslim struggle has seen its own political infighting among different groups.

For instance, the armed rebellion peaked in the seventies led by the Moro National Liberation Front. But a splinter group — the Moro Islamic Liberation Front or MILF — later gained strength after the MNLF signed a peace accord in 1996 and then played a key role in the Muslim autonomous region in the south.

It is the MILF that Estrada ordered the military to defeat during his presidency and which spurred the making of Bagong Buwan — although the different episodes of rebellion in the South, no doubt, have had similar effects on non-combatants.

In this case, the military offensives caused the displacement of tens of thousands of refugees, the destruction of the MILF's main camps as well as some mosques in the area.

The movie tries to convey a sense of hope — thus the title New Moon — despite the deaths at the end of Ahmad and his mother — but not without treading into the difficult debates about the Muslim Filipinos' search for an identity and their long-held grievances against the central government.

And so Ahmad, who at the start of the film says he believes that education, not war, is the best way for Muslims to break out of marginalisation, himself gets trapped in a war that does not choose its victims.

Ahmad, played by actor Cesar Montano, is also at odds with his brother, a member of the armed group Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Ahmad also tries to win over his nephew Rashid, a teenage rebel well-versed in the handling of arms and killings and who says his uncle has been softened by the kafir (infidels) in Manila.

Ahmad's own turning point occurs when, in bringing dozens of women, children and the elderly to what they thought would be a safe area — but which has been charred to the ground in a military operation — he sees soldiers relieving themselves in a burnt-out mosque.

At that point, Ahmad fires at the soldiers, strengthened and at the same time exhausted by his own anger.

Armed conflict

In the end, the Muslim professional who wants to be stay away from armed conflict gets shot at and dies, as he tries rescue a Catholic boy from being caught in the crossfire in yet another encounter with the armed forces.

The real war was never too far from the film, Diaz-Abaya says, adding that real events and scenes she had seen in Mindanao have been incorporated in it. ''I actually saw people die the way they are shown in the movie. The people died like flies,'' she recalls.

The cast underwent months of research and familiarisation with the local Muslim culture and experts on Islamic studies, followed by two months of workshops for the actors.

As for the actor Montano, he says he and Diaz-Abaya were clear about the film's pro-peace message. ''I should say that after doing the movie, I understand the Muslims better. If we were in their shoes, I guess we would do the same thing,'' he explains in an interview with a local paper, The Philippine Star .

He quoted the Philippine national hero Jose Rizal, who was executed by Spanish colonisers in the 19th century, for insurrection: ''Like what Rizal did against the Spaniards, (he said) 'we're being exploited by the Spaniards, so the only recourse was to fight back'.''

''We know a bit of Muslim history, but I think many people can't understand why there is war in Mindanao,'' says Montano, who won the best actor award in the film festival.