Despite the dismal fate of Milagros in the box office, the big producers were still ready to take a risk on Abaya. And her next film came in the form of a script, Mga Bangka sa Tag-Araw/Boats in Summer, that she came upon while serving as a member of the jury panel for the Palanca Awards, the Philippines’ equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. The screenplay won first prize and Abaya immediately optioned it from its young writer, Jun Lana. GMA Films, a fairly new division of the giant TV-radio conglomerate GMA, stepped forward to provide most of the then remarkably huge budget of ₱17 million ($450 thousand) more than twice the average budget of ₱8 million ($200 thousand), for an industry that was then turning out a respectable average of 175 films a year. 63 64
Abaya’s experience producing Milagros had a liberating effect on her and with that film, she managed to break beyond the feminist preoccupations and the realist mode that had marked much of her body of work. Finding herself at a crossroads, Lana’s script gave her a chance to strike out in new directions. Abaya had long been typed as a director of female, if not feminist, films, and the new project centered on the experiences and memories of a young male growing up in a fishing community in the 1950s. The mode of the story is also a departure, recalling the magic realism of Latin American novelists. In this isolated island world, a ghost appears, a woman gives birth to a snake, a mermaid flashes by, a pregnancy is ascribed to spirits, witchcraft inflicts pain,
The film, eventually titled Sa Pusod ng Dagat/In the Navel of the Sea (1998), attempts to encompass man’s life cycle from the point of view of the young Pepito (Jomari Yllana) who goes around assisting his mother Rosa (Elizabeth Oropesa) in her work as the island’s only comadrona (midwife) before he eventually takes over her job.
. After Pepito’s fisherman father perishes at sea, loneliness drives his mother into the arms of a married fisherman, Gusting (Pen Medina). When Rosa gets pregnant later in the film, a sense of abandonment and guilt drives her to commit a tragic act.
One of the island’s young women, Minda (Tanya Gomez) has eyes for Pepito, but he is attracted instead to a more mature woman from the mainland, Mrs. Santiago (Chin Chin Gutierrez), who occasionally visits the island on teaching missions. Tanya tries to get back at Pepito by means of witchcraft which has the effect of causing him excruciating stabs of pain. She eventually lets go of Pepito, when she decides to leave the island for a bigger world. Pepito follows Mrs. Santiago to the mainland and starts an affair with her. But remorse drives her to return to her husband and Pepito eventually goes back to his life on the island, helping bring new life into the world. Eventually, he becomes not just the island’s assistant to births, but also it’s storyteller and keeper of old memories and myths, beloved by its children.
Abaya shot most of the film in the fishing hamlets in Batangas and her love for nature and the sea suffuses Pusod, glowingly photographed by Romeo Vitug. The film captures the insularity of its microcosmic world but also its wonderment, and in Abaya’s hands, the island has an air of both reality and myth. The film stumbles a bit in a subplot involving Rosa who, as a midwife, would presumably be a grim realist in matters of pregnancy. Yet when her unwanted pregnancy comes, it causes her to lose her sanity. Nevertheless, Oropesa delivered an excellent performance, and so did the rest of the ensemble. Indeed, Pusod remains one of the most resonant and expansive works in Abaya’s filmography.
Though some of Abaya’s previous works had gotten a smattering of invitations to international film festivals, mostly in Asia, Pusod was the film that first brought her to the attention of the festival world at large, with invitations to a dozen-and-a-half festivals in Asia, Europe and North America. It won the FIPRESCI/NETPAC prize at the Singapore International Film Festival, and it’s presence at the Berlin International Film Festival generated enough interest in her work in Germany where they eventually mounted Diaz-Abaya retrospectives in Munich and Düsseldorf.
For whatever the international acclaim, Pusod made a dismal showing at the box office, sadly an all-too-common fate of innovative films in the Philippines. It was particularly acute for Pusod due to the large budget that GMA had lavished on it, requiring returns of ₱50 million ($1.25 million) just to break even. Whatever the box office results, the funds spent were on the screen to see, if not for that generation of audiences, then for future ones. This must have been one of the considerations of the GMA producers when they decided to continue with the film project that they had already engaged Abaya to produce, a biography of the national hero Jose Rizal. The epic period film would cost ₱80 million ($2 million) more than ten times that of the average film. It became the most expensive film to date since the birth of Philippine cinema almost a century ago. 65 66
Abaya had actually refused the project when it fell on her lap. Long before GMA offered it to her, the media giant had promised the National Centennial Commission that a film about Rizal would be their contribution to the centennial celebration of the 1898 Philippine independence from Spain. GMA had engaged another leading director of the Second Golden Age, Mike de Leon, to produce the Rizal film and in fact, de Leon had already started shooting some footage. However, he found himself at a creative impasse and GMA saw the need to back out of the contract. So GMA producers Jimmy Duavit and Butch Jimenez approached Abaya and asked if she could take over. Her immediate response: “No, I don’t think so!” The producers urged her not to be so quick and to just think it over. 67
Abaya told them that if she were to do the film, she would have two conditions: (1) That she start from scratch with a new script by Lee and his team. She had heard that de Leon was already on the fourteenth draft of the script. In fact, she had read one of the drafts, and while de Leon’s version may be appropriate for him, it was not a fit for her. (2) A cast change of lead actor to Cesar Montano. But though GMA acceded to her conditions, Abaya still balked at taking the job. Not that she had nothing to say about Rizal. She had always been an admirer and scholar of Rizal and had grown up reading his novels and poems in the original Spanish, unlike most contemporary Filipinos who could only access them in the English or Tagalog translations. 68
But how to do a film biography of this most beloved of Philippine heroes, who was omnipresent in Philippine consciousness and culture, from the peso coin to countless streets and schools, even funeral parlors, bearing his name or image; from innumerable plazas spreading outward from his pedestal, to the national monument raised on the strip of land where in 1896 the Spanish authorities executed him, age 35, for inspiring the Philippine revolution? And how to do a film on a man who mostly lived a life of the mind, on this ophthalmologist who was novelist, poet, biologist, journalist, and philologist (he could speak 22 languages), who spent a great part of his adult life in cheap boarding rooms in Europe writing articles and novels, not exactly the most actionable material for the action-oriented medium of film?
And how to deal with Rizal’s literary creations, the poems, and the Noli Me Tangere/Touch Me Not and El Filibusterismo/The Filibuster, his two self-published novels (the first in Berlin, the other in Ghent) that sparked the idea of nationhood among Filipinos who heretofore identified themselves only with their own clans or tribes or narrow interests? Indeed, these two novels had already been adapted for film during the First Golden Age of Philippine Cinema by one of the country’s great visual masters, Gerry de Leon. Rizal even won back-to-back best-story trophies, however posthumously, from the FAMAS (the local equivalent of the Oscars) for de Leon’s classic adaptations.
There were already earlier attempts to bring Rizal’s life to film. In 1912, there was a race between two films, La Vida de Jose Rizal/The Life of Jose Rizal and El Fusiliamento de Dr. Jose Rizal/The Execution of Dr. Jose Rizal. The latter film premiered ahead of its rival by one day. 69 In 1956, Ramon Estella made the three-hour Buhay at Pag-Ibig ni Dr. Jose Rizal/Life and Loves of Dr. Jose Rizal. Rizaliana in Philippine films gathered steam again in 1996, during the centennial commemoration of his execution, with Butch Nolasco’s moving documentary Jose Rizal: Ang Buhay ng Isang Bayani/Jose Rizal: The Life of a Hero (1996); and Tikoy Aguiluz’s Rizal sa Dapitan/Rizal in Dapitan (1997) that modestly confined its scope to the four years that the Spanish authorities kept Rizal in exile in a peninsula in the remote region of Mindanao. And somewhere waiting in the wings was the biographical Sisa (1999) where writer-director Mario O’Hara imagines Rizal having an affair with one of his fictional characters, the mad Sisa, in a production that cost a mere ₱250 thousand ($60 thousand) 70 as opposed to GMA’s ₱80 million budget for their Rizal film; and eventually Mike de Leon’s own Rizal film, Bayaning Third World/Third World Hero (2000), a post-modern tale revolving around the impossibility of making a film about Rizal. But the project that GMA envisioned was anything but modest. They wanted nothing less than the definitive film on Rizal, worthy of a centenary, a film for ages.
Weeks passed from the initial offer and Abaya was still pushing it off, with Manolo sometimes ribbing her about being a “coward.” One day, Abaya’s sons Marco and David, who were both high school students at Rizal’s alma mater, the Ateneo de Manila, came home and over afternoon snack, Marco said that he heard all over school that she was directing the film on Jose Rizal. Abaya said, no, no, no, no… it was just an offer. Upon hearing this, Marco set down his fork and glared at his mother, uttering that he could not believe that his mom would turn down directing the bio on Jose Rizal, the man who also studied at Ateneo. “What face am I gonna show in school?” Marco asked desperately. David was looking on disconsolately as well. Abaya was on the point of tears. She stood up and phoned Duavit. She told him that he had Marco Abaya to thank; she had finally decided to take the project. Though seemingly just a little domestic vignette, the glimpse is actually illustrative of how future generations, perhaps more than with any other film of hers, were on Abaya’s mind when she started working tirelessly on the film. 71
For the writing team, Abaya assembled Lee, Lana and Peter Ong Lim. Discussions on how they would tackle the subject were “bloody,” according to Lee. 72 The epic scope of the subject matter was difficult enough, but even up to then, Rizal’s life had remained a subject of controversy. Did he get married to the Irish Josephine Bracken on his last day as some claimed? Did he write and sign a retraction of his attacks against the corrupt Catholic Church, thus backing off on his principles? Was he reformist or did he support the revolution?
The strategy Abaya and his writers settled on was challenging: They would write the film from the point of view of Rizal as an artist/intellectual in a web of flashbacks from his life and recreations from his novels, exploring the interconnections between his life and his works.
Preparations for the shooting were intense. Abaya herself drew up a three-month syllabus for Cesar Montano, who would play Rizal, consisting of history, politics, poetry, fencing, penmanship and Spanish diction. Abaya required her team to read or re-read the Noli and the Fili and do independent research on Rizal’s life; and they would all meet every Friday to quiz and update each other. Production designer Leo Abaya (no relation) and his team left no stone unturned in recreating the world of late 19th-century Calamba (Rizal’s provincial hometown), Manila and Madrid to the point of securing special permission from the Central Bank for reproducing the silver and gold coins of the time. Their enthusiasm went beyond the film, as they saw in their work an opportunity to showcase the wealth of Philippine visual design heritage. CGI was used for the first time in Philippine films, to erase the golf links and modern buildings around Intramuros (the sadly sparse remnants of Manila’s once resplendent Spanish colonial walled city) and digitally “rebuild” facades of the old city that could only be found in the surviving photos before World War II destroyed it. 73
José Rizal (1998) is a work of amazing achievement and stunning miscalculations.
Amazing is how Abaya and her writers managed to cram in practically all the events of primary importance in Rizal’s life — and in non-chronological order at that, and even lavishly intermingled with scenes from his novels — without getting the timeline of Rizal’s life muddled or confusing. There’s his childhood in a huge house with doting parents Teodora (Gloria Diaz) and Francisco (Ronnie Lazaro), his early studies in a nearby town, his Jesuit education at the Ateneo de Manila and further studies in medicine at the University of Santo Tomas, his star-crossed romance with Leonor Rivera (Mickey Ferriols), the two-year imprisonment of his mother by military authorities on trumped up charges of poisoning a relative, the development of political consciousness of Rizal and his mentor/brother Paciano (Pen Medina).
Rizal’s life in Madrid is recreated as well: Getting caught in the middle of a liberal, anti-government rally; fraternal gatherings with fellow Filipino scholars and expats in clubs where, when not carousing with women and wine, they would talk politics and set up groups and journals advocating liberal or nationalist reforms for Filipinos; the famous oration that Rizal delivered about the universality of genius on the occasion of Juan Luna and Felix Resurrecion Hidalgo winning the gold and silver medals in the 1884 Madrid Exposition.
The writers chose two periods from Rizal’s life from which to launch the series of flashbacks: (1) Rizal’s spell in a bleak boarding room in the Belgian town of Ghent as he works on his correspondence and struggles to get his novel Fili published. (2) His interval of incarceration in Intramuros towards the end of his life, where he tells episodes of his past to his court-appointed Spanish defense lawyer Luis Taviel de Andrade (Jaime Fabregas) and a young Filipino prison servant (Jhong Hilario), a character invented by the scriptwriters apparently to represent the future generation. These two episodes serve as some kind of organizing principle or anchor for the flashbacks and the crossovers to the fictional scenes from Rizal’s novels.
Thus does the film get us up to date on Rizal’s troubles with the friars and Spanish authorities due to his writings; the forced expulsion of his family among some 300 others from the land that they were leasing from usurious Domnican friars; the formation of the nationalist La Liga Filipina by Rizal, Andres Bonifacio (Gardo Versoza) and others to push for political reforms; Rizal forced into a four-year exile to the remote peninsula of Dapitan in Mindanao, where he eventually meets the young Irish woman Josephine Bracken (Chin Chin Gutierrez); their life together as common-law spouses and her miscarriage; the formation without Rizal’s knowledge of the revolutionary Katipunan, the secret society inspired by his writings; and Rizal’s arrest and the charges that would lead to his execution.
As if the multiple flashback constructions were not elaborate enough, the film also serves out huge dollops of lavishly reconstructed scenes from Rizal’s novels (shot in color but presented in monochrome), whose main protagonist Crisostomo Ibarra (Joel Torre) comes back to his hometown of San Diego from a seven-year absence while studying in Europe. His efforts to establish a progressive school and get married to his long-time betrothed Maria Clara (Monique Wilson) are thwarted every step of the way by the Spanish friars, led by Fray Damaso (Cristobal Gomez).
But why then does the film so often come across as bland and insipid? Among the problems are the film’s use of long stretches of speeches and polemical arguments by Rizal, Taviel and even the fictional characters, that tend to continually obstruct the emotional force and coherence that the elaborate framework so badly needs. Moreover, the crossovers from reality to fiction and back often fail to generate the emotional power that may lift the scenes above bland illustrated history.
The film’s gravest miscalculation must be the way the friars, the villains of both history (Archbishop Nozaleda) and novels (Damaso, Salvi, Sibyla) are depicted. Their arrogance, venality and cruelty are relentlessly overplayed to the point of caricature and farce. The potbellied Fray Damaso is first seen looming over the jutting bare breasts of a cowering native woman, as he prepares with the relish and glee of a rutting pig to rape her. The parodic approach to the main antagonists of the story, the long-staying friar orders that were in many ways the real power behind the revolving Spanish colonial administrations, is so unwavering that it cannot be ascribed to mere oversight.
Perhaps Abaya was trying to sweep away the cobwebs of reverence that had accumulated around Rizal and his novels, which after all were written as satires, by allowing her actors to overplay to comic effect. But this strategy in the end gravely weakens the film, seeming to constantly signal to the spectator that he cannot be trusted to recognize arrogance and cruelty unless these were amplified to deafening decibels and pushed right to his face. Worse, this approach makes it difficult to take these buffoonish antagonists seriously, thereby undermining the import and gravity, even the dramatic credibility, of the life and death conflict at the heart of the story.
All this is a drag on Montano, struggling to overcome his natural limitations – a certain scarcity of gravitas behind the devilishly charming eyes, vocal delivery that tarries too often on the wispy side – in his effort to deliver a performance that is both relatable and credibly intellectual; he eventually succeeds and becomes truly moving in the last section of the film when the death sentence has been laid down and he begins to face his impending death with heartbreaking calm. Indeed, it is only in the last 20 minutes, after an interminable 2 ½ hours, that the film truly soars, as it details the last day of Rizal with an emotional power that is mostly missing in the rest of the film.
For a work that has so many achievements, not the least its lavish production design, it is, in the end, stunningly inert – the film teems with color but feels lifeless, like butterflies in a glass case or a colony of bees stuck in amber.
With its undeniable achievements and maddening flaws, the film opened to fiercely mixed critical reception, with some writing that it was dull dull dul, others hailing it as a thrilling masterpiece. Others caviled at errors in historical perspective. Judges at the Metro Manila film festival loved José Rizal enough to award it 17 trophies, including picture, director, screenplay and actor. The film went on to become one of the most decorated films ever from industry and critics’ award-giving bodies. Perhaps even more important for the producers who had gambled such lavish sums on the production, it became hugely profitable, in fact the most commercially successful Philippine film to date, aided by the wide reach of GMA TV and radio network, the buzz created by the centennial celebrations, and school teachers across the country requiring their students to see the film. There was particular interest in Germany where Rizal had trained in ophthalmology and where he published his first novel. José Rizal became one of Abaya’s most internationally seen films, invited to festivals and retrospectives from Busan to Tokyo, Madrid to Paris, Chicago to New York. All about an icon, this glittering mess of a film became an icon in itself. And though it might since have dropped off the radar of critically favored films as reflected in its absence from an extensive 2013 poll on the greatest Philippine films of all time, the epic making of Jose Rizal will long be remembered as a landmark event in Philippine film history. 74
Basking in its harvest of cash and prestige, GMA was eager to do another film with Abaya.
She proposed shooting a drama under the sea.
Abaya had grown to love the sea since she went on a diving expedition to Cebu about a decade ago and soon became an avid deep sea explorer. 75 In 2009, she would publish a book, Moonlit Seasons (2009), that would pay tribute to the sea. The opening poem of the book read:
a coral garden
deep inside my mother’s womb
In the dark, spawning
white tops on blue bay
windsurfers in pas de deux
Oh sweet amihan 76
choirs of angelfish
Beethoven’s ninth symphony
diver’s cathedral 77
On her diving expeditions, she learned of the illegal practice of muro ami (literally fishnet), also known as reef-hunting, where children are usually employed to pound sea corals with rocks to drive fishes into large nets. The consequent destruction of coral reefs, which takes whole lifetimes to form, has proved cataclysmic not only for their inhabitant sea creatures, but to the environment as a whole. Conservationists have singled out the Philippines as the most acute case where 70% of its reefs have been destroyed and only 5% can be considered to be in good condition. 78
The use of children as young as five years old, seen as more agile than adults, is yet another tragic face of muro ami. Indeed, Abaya had already touched on the muro ami phenomenon in a brief episode towards the end of her 1996 film Madonna and Child where the young boy at the heart of the story is found working in a muro ami boat.
Though the story of the exploited children would form a major element in her next film Muro Ami/Reef Hunters (1999), Abaya would choose to tell a bigger story, a parable of the human conflict with the sea, man against nature, each attempting to destroy each other where grace is absent (a theme that calls to mind works like Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea). Abaya said: “I wanted to veer away from social realism, a point that I was least interested in. I was interested in the idea of The Voyage, with the ship as a metaphor in the specific space which is the sea.” 79 She envisioned a film that would be “…a very direct expression of my obsession and worship of the sea. All of the characters in it… are composites of the people I know. If I could introduce a part of my spiritual relationship with the sea with an audience that has never been underwater, that would be enough for me.” 80
Abaya called upon members of her Rizal team to help her realize her watery vision: Lee and Lana for the script, Rody Lacap for cinematography, Leo Abaya for production design (ably abetted by the magnificent coral reefs of Bohol where the film was shot), Jesse Navarro for editing, and Nonong Buencamino for music. Aiding Lacap was Marilou’s husband Manolo, back briefly in film, as one of the underwater camera operators.
Abaya cast 35 children who were chosen based on underwater swimming and acting skills. For the leading role of Fredo, the obsessive captain of the muro ami ship, Abaya cast Cesar Montano who thought he had already seen Abaya’s tough side in José Rizal, until they started working on the this film. “The research alone was overwhelming,” he said. “We had to be in good physical shape all throughout the shooting and working forty feet underwater most of the time. Direk was a diver herself, that’s why she could block scenes underwater. That’s why I didn’t complain because she was determined to do that film in spite of the difficulties.” 81
Muro Ami/Reef Hunters opens in confident fashion with what must be some of the most mermerizing underwater passages created – a spectral jellyfish makes its progress as various colonies of fish and corals come into view. A man swims among them, a long diaphanous net trailing him. Then the sea creatures combine in various musical configurations inside a graceful net, only the spare and ghostly musical score hinting at their fate.
Fredo (Montano), owner of a large, rusty fishing vessel goes around a seaside village to recruit small boys for his enterprise. The poverty endemic in the villages drive the parents to audition their children for the jobs despite the dangers and the months of separation that these entail.
The children and the few adults in the ship live in sub-human conditions, crammed in rat-infested bunks and forced to dive eight times a day. However hard Fredo is on the children, he is hardest on himself, obsessively working to the bone even with a deep wound festering on his back.
Fredo’s goal is to fill all 500 giant tubs he has brought for the voyage, something that his more grounded father Dado (Pen Medina) thinks is unrealistic and ruinous for everyone on the ship. But Fredo is the captain and he has his goals. Fredo’s furious exploitation of the sea is rooted not merely in economic motives but in anger. A tidal wave had once swept his wife and infant daughter into the sea and Fredo has been a tortured soul since, haunted by dreams of seeing his wife again, cradling their infant in a watery grotto.
The exploitation perpetrated by Fredo and others has been calamitous for the sea. But the sea has a way of getting back. Catch gets more and more difficult to come by and Fredo and his recruits are forced to sail further and further away into uncharted territories in search of surviving reefs and sea creatures.
Never has Abaya’s filmmaking been as muscular as in Muro Ami and her handling of the incidents in this voyage is riveting: Montano spearing a rat whose blood splatters on a boy’s face, the various undersea expeditions by Montano and the boys, the destruction of the coral reefs, the volatile relationship between Fredo and his thieving deputy Botong (Jhong Hilario) who eventually leads a mutiny against him, the onboard visit of hard-boiled prostitute Susan (Amy Austria), a flu epidemic in the children’s bunk room.
Then there is the death of one of the few adult recruits, who drowns while caught in one of the huge nets under the sea. Fredo refuses to waste precious days by going back to the mainland with the man’s body. Instead, he orders his men to add more salt on the corpse until they could chance upon some islet to bury it.
The film has been taken to task for making Montano’s struggle with the sea its central conflict, instead of the exploitation of the children sea drivers. But shouldn’t an artist be allowed to tell a story from whatever angle she chooses when she wants to address a matter of universal human concern? Besides, there is virtue in calling attention to, say, the destruction of coral reefs or the exploitation of children, without having to push them into audiences’ faces. And despite the lateral approach, Muro Ami, more than any other feature film, has raised awareness of these problems. Sometimes, indirection may be the more effective in reaching hearts and minds.
Nevertheless, the angle on the children, however strong, is the one element that could apparently still stand some improvement. The adult characters Fredo, Dado, Botong and Susan are so individualized, it’s a pity that none of the children were as sharply drawn. Indeed, the distinction between the adult professional actors and the young non-professionals is often only too apparent. The attempt to develop one of the children is there: About one hour in, the film trains its spotlight on little Kalbo (transliteration Baldie, played by Rebecca Lusterio). All throughout, we’ve been glimpsing Kalbo as one of the little boys, until we discover with Fredo that she’s actually a girl. (So good is Lusterio that it’s still difficult to imagine her as a girl even after we’ve learned otherwise.) Kalbo reminds Fredo of his lost daughter who would have been the same age, and after battling with his emotions and throwing her into the sea where she survives a night-time brush with a shark, Fredo softens towards her and even starts showing concern for the other children as well.
Kalbo and the other children respond to Fredo’s new-found concern and they begin to see him not just as harsh employer but as caring hero. The sudden mass conversion of the children to Fredo seems forced and could have been better prepared and developed, a soft spot in what is otherwise a rigorous and bracingly unsentimental work. The children side with Fredo during a mutiny by the few adults on the ship when they wrap Fredo and his father in nets and throw them into the sea to drown. Montano, laboring in the severe conditions of underwater shooting, turns in a bravura performance, capably embodying the film’s vision. And indeed, for whatever its flaws, Muro Ami remains one of Diaz’s masterworks, certainly among her strangest and most visionary.
The film opened at the Metro Manila Film Festival where it won thirteen of its sixteen nominations, including best picture and director. Muro Ami became one of those instances, sadly far too unusual in the Philippines, that combined both critical acclaim and box office luster.
As with her other more recent films, Muro Ami got invitations to several foreign film festivals, and this helped pave the way for the current success of Philippine films in the international festival circuit.
References
63 Jose Rizal: Making of a Masterpiece (GMA Films, 1998).
64 Tiongson, Nick, ed. The Urian Anthology: 1990-99 (The University of the Philippines Press, Quezon City, 2010), p. 502-31.
65 Zulueta, Lito, Did Diaz-Abaya Bite More than She Could Chew? The Urian Anthology: 1990-99 (The University of the Philippines Press, Quezon City, 2010), p. 208.
66 Sotto, Agustin, A Brief History of Philippine Cinema. The Urian Anthology: 1990-99 (The University of the Philippines Press, Quezon City, 2010), p. 44.
67 Ibid. 44.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid. 65, p. 46.
70 Vera, Noel. Rizal Films. Critic After Dark (Big O Books, Singapore, 2005), p.97.
71 Ibid. 66.
72 Ibid. 63.
73 Ibid.
74 50 Greatest Pinoy Films of All Time. Pinoy Rebyu. http://pinoyrebyu.wordpress.com/50-greatest-pinoy-films-of-all-time/
75 Tariman, Pablo. Moonlit Seasons: Reflections on Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Art and Life. (The Philippine Star, 2013, April 5). http://blogs.blog43.com/news/newswire/deepseasalt/www.philstar.com/entertainment/2013/04/05/927059/marilou-diaz-abaya-turns-58
76 Amihan = Breeze
77 Ibid. 74.
78 Ocean World/Texas A&M University. Coral Reef Destruction and Conservation. http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/students/coral/coral5.htm
79 Tarima, Pablo. Marilou Abaya’s “Muro-Ami” Marks 10th Anniversary. (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 2009, Dec 28). http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/artsandbooks/artsandbooks/view/20091228-244233/Marilou-Abayas-Muro-ami-marks-10th-anniversary
80 Ibid. 75
81 Tariman, Pablo. Muro-Ami 10 Years After. (Philstar, 2010, Feb 22). http://www.philstar.com/entertainment/551515/muro-ami-10-years-after