Pureza

The term means “purity” or “chastity” but in this particular film premiered last Tuesday, the word means the amount of sugar that a cane contains. Pureza is the basis of determining how much a cane costs.

The almost full length documentary deals with Philippine sugar, focused on Negros, tracing its history and growth and the issues that have bedeviled the industry since its beginnings in the mid-19th century to the present including a pitch for the inevitable reduction of tariff on imported sugar.

The film is balanced and independent in its approach and tells the story of the industry as can be captured on film and as related or cited by many people interviewed, some within the industry and others outside of it but whose views impact on the message of the film.

The film is an honest and even bold presentation of the situation in the sugar industry in Negros and the fact that Jay Abello, the film’s director and one of its brains is of the Negros industry’s wealthy families, makes the film more significant and a catharsis, a sort confrontation of the ghost of the past, an effort to seek meaning and redemption from the events that make the industry a popular whipping boy of non-planters.

The producers made every effort to authenticate its contents with a string of interviews, clippings, family photos and film footages. It went into sugar cane farms, talked with the workers and recorded their daily lives, their pains and dreams as if to strike at the conscience of the audience.

It presented the biases of some sugar producers, their defense of their lifestyles and manners and why they managed their farms as they do. Although the film did not give much attention to the perceptions of people outside of the industry, the film nevertheless touched on it a little bit.

This is a tricky one. The general perception of the industry and its leadership even by national leaders is mostly negative. The film, without perhaps meaning to, actually reinforces this biased and even cynical view rather than explain that this perception is more myth than fact.

There was a portion where the industry is depicted with its socio-economic programs that liberated many children from the shackles of rural poverty but this was not pursued in other to further correct many misconceptions of the industry. Perhaps this should be another documentary to at least make people outside and even within Negros realize that the industry is also a victim of negative propaganda and not as brutish as depicted.

There are some lapses, some trivial others significant. It repeated the word “haciendero”. There is no Spanish word “haciendero”. The correct word is “hacendado” which means a landowner, property owner, planter or a rancher.

Funny but the slang word “hacendero” is used in Latin America to mean a farm worker. How this came of use here is a story in itself but had the film researchers given some attention to the period between 1855 and 1880 they would have found similarities with the present day agrarian reform program and “hacendero”.

The segment on CARP should be seen by legislators because what were said and warned in 1987 had come to pass and showing a whole generation of slow retrogression of the farm workers.

There is another lapse worth commenting lest it is perpetuated. The friars were presented as either land grabbers or abetting land grabbing. This idea is popular in Luzon but this did not happen in Negros. The depicted priests were even not authentically attired. The priests who were at the center of the development of the sugar industry in Negros were Recollects and their religious habits are entirely different.

The film took the road of least resistance by using information popular in Luzon, erroneously depicting for Negros what was prevalent in Luzon under other religious congregations.  

In Luzon were friar lands, large tracts of them that were later on distributed to their tenants. In Negros there are no friar lands and the encomienda here was abolished in 1720; the Recollects came in 1848. The Negros haciendas did not evolve from encomiendas. Had the film looked on relevant clerical influence here it would have changed its perspective and fairness.

The film should be shown to as many people as possible, especially by those outside the sugar industry. The schools in Negros should sponsor it for their students because this is their history and for them to understand the price in pain, suffering and lost dreams that the poor have to pay for the sugar in their candies and drinks.

This is not just another film. This is social commentary with us as the subject and object of its message.

The film has opened something that many refuse to see or have not seen in their own backyard. This is our situation, the question is, “what now?”*

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