Distress in the Agusan Marshlands: Mapping Landscapes of Fear in Francis Xavier Pasion’s Bwaya (2014)

In March 2009, 12-year-old Rowena Romano, an Agusanon Manobo, was aboard one of two boats with a guardian, her classmate Jennifer Rodrigo, and a Save Mindanao Volunteers member, heading to a floating school on Lake Mihaba near the town of Loreto in the province of Agusan when a 30-foot-long crocodile knocked over their boat and took Rowena. The incident occurred in the fourth largest province in the Philippines in terms of land area. Primarily occupying the province’s vast marshlands, the Agusanon Manobo is one of Mindanao’s eight Indigenous cultural communities. This chapter explores the illustrations of fear conveyed by the rural landscape in the film Bwaya [“Crocodile”] (dir. Francis Xavier Pasion, 2014) and the Indigenous characters’ responses to the emotive qualities towards the rural landscape, which underlines fear as the primary sentiment for the Agusanon Manobos, given the crocodile attack. I inquire how the rural landscape portrayed in the film illustrates fear as experienced by the characters. Finally, I draw attention to the conceptions and the manifestations of fear outlined by Yi-Fu Tuan in Landscapes of Fear (1979), where the potential roots of human society’s “Fear of Nature” correlate with Filipino conventions and Indigenous beliefs of the Agusanon Manobos that are represented in the selected film.