Negotiations on Necropolitics and Death in the Cinema on the Indigenous Peoples of Mindanao

This chapter probes the contours of Lumad, a collective term for the Indigenous Peoples from the southern Philippines, and death in Mindanao cinema. It closely examines Ang mga Tigmo sa Akong Pagpauli (Riddles of My Homecoming) (dir., Arnel Mardoquio, Arnel. 2013), a film based on Mindanao settler’s beliefs that the souls of dead Lumad return to their homeland to resolve unfinished businesses. Through a set of tableaux and other surreal images in the sphere of dreams, the film may seem to homogenize various Lumad circumstances and lifeworlds. On the one hand, it may be deduced that this construction exhibits essentialist tendencies. Still, on the other hand, it may be opined as productive in articulating Lumad collective experiences that have long been forgotten and sidelined in the detritus of the Philippine national imagination. Using Achille Mbembe’s (2019) concept of necropolitics, or “the subjugation of life to the power of death” (92), this chapter explores how the rendering of death in the film Ang mga Tigmo sa Akong Pagpauli is primarily entwined in the unequal economic distribution, anti-poor policies that favor foreigners, and draconian power interplay propagated by the Philippine state. Furthermore, the systemic disenfranchisement toward Indigenous Peoples is significantly evident in natural disasters, human rights abuses, and political violence in Mindanao, even during the time of Rodrigo Roa Duterte—the first Mindanaoan president of the Philippines. Finally, this investigates how Lumad death in the film can be conspicuously tragic but, at the same time, a weapon of cultures.