REVIEW: ‘Lost Sabungeros’ recounts a routine tale of injustice, but falters cinematically
Lost Sabungeros, after its Cinemalaya premiere had been axed over "security concerns," is reaching more audiences.
In a previous interview, director Bryan Brazil outright described the cancellation as a form of censorship. The scheduled screenings of the documentary, which tracks the mysterious disappearances of over 30 cockfighting aficionados in the Philippines since 2021, were dropped, which to the director still feels rather vague.
Forged out of a six-part series televised by Sunday news magazine show Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho at the height of the cases, the film is now set to tour campuses, beginning at the film center of the University of the Philippines, an autonomous institution, on November 28 and 29.
This, following the film’s debut at the QCinema International Film Festival two weeks ago, its recent screening at Pelikultura: The Calabarzon Film Festival, and as it tries to secure a rating from the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB), which has yet to review the film on account of the sub judice rule, prohibiting public comments and disclosures of cases still in court.
The film, migrating between documentary evidence, testimonials from families of the victims and whistleblowers, animation, and even reenactments, situates the story smack dab in the site of the early sabungero disappearances, the Manila Arena, and goes on to unravel the politics, culture, and, above all, the material circumstances factoring into the lives of those deciding to enter the world of cockfighting, which moved into virtual spaces during the global pandemic, hence the term e-sabong, and has since been banned by the previous regime.
The title is at its best when it works with context. While it chiefly rehashes information that is already public knowledge, the viewer can appreciate the legwork Brazil, alongside writers Lee Joseph Castel, Mary Zeliet Paris, and Marco Romas, has put into the film, unafraid to access morally gray areas to argue that small-time gamblers often resort to practices such as cockfighting on the off chance of pulling themselves and their families out of poverty, out of numbing hardship.
Interviews reveal that the sabungeros were abducted because they were supposedly guilty of cheating, the likes of betting against a player’s own cock, known as tyope, or cloning betting websites run by gaming tycoon Charlie “Atong” Ang, who was subpoenaed by a Senate panel in 2022 over his alleged involvement in said disappearances.
But past the tireless tracking of all possible leads and commitment to truth and some semblance of clarity, what really makes the film more tactile and emotionally crushing is the presence of lives disrupted by the struggle for justice that often requires time and deep pockets to breach an impasse, if at all. We see what hopes, grief, and fears inform each fight, each case filed and later withdrawn, each protest held to surface the disappeared, and how vexing it is to simply put faith in the government, as one senator would venture to say. At points, the film would even break tone so as to show how such lives who have gone through so much still manage to soldier on, to don a smile, in spite.
Profound and fitting as this exploration of inner lives may seem, it sadly works only to an extent. When I saw the film at QCinema, I came to it not looking for filmic and artistic daring, but for the possibilities of the story and, by extension, some form of closure, even as I’m well-versed about how these things work, especially in a country now caught in a tumultuous rift between its two highest leaders. But I think it’s also a disservice to the story when we disregard its mode of articulation, considering that there are better alternatives. Isn’t the telling just as pivotal as what is being told?
The film, for the most part, is mounted with the brio of drama and intrigue, which has accumulated since the Cinemalaya fiasco, so much so that it eclipses the matter at hand. The mounting buckles because of its concession to a televisual approach, which of course might be hard to do away with particularly for a team that has worked for years at GMA Public Affairs.
The editing and sound design feel rather episodic, as though you could almost sense the commercial break about to hijack the film at any juncture; in simple terms, the KMJS brand of storytelling. This, on top of the inclusion of reenactments and the subpar acting in it, as well as the off-putting, sensational use of blood splatters over photos of the disappeared, and the overall animation that doesn’t seem to elevate the already-slipshod artistic decisions. Even the appearance of the primary whistleblower in the film at times feels counterfeit, precisely because of how he is presented.
Beyond these details, what really bruises the telling is how the film invokes the distance that news reporters would usually turn to. It’s not that it isn’t a sound vantage point and creative anchor; it’s more to do with how it towers over the film that it restrains the potential of the narrative, its very subject, from leaping visually, cinematically. It’s particularly glaring as well how the film refuses to extend its commentary to the ongoing, large-scale system that disappears not just small-time gamblers but dissenters of the state and lays claim to their many inner lives.
Flawed as it may be, Lost Sabungeros interrogates how routine neglect and injustice are in our sorrowful republic, and how the course of our lives nearly runs parallel to the lives of cocks primed for a derby. “If you win, you get to live. If you lose, you die.”
This is why documentaries such as this remain urgent, essential to make, to be seen by the broader public.