A movie about Leon Kilat

Before I proceed with the main gist of this column, I would like to invite everyone to “Pinturas Cuzqueñas: An Exhibit and Open Bid Auction of Original Cuzco (Peru) Paintings” by the Archdiocesan Museum of Cebu (AMC) and SM City Cebu. The exhibition-cum-auction will open tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the SM City Art Center, on the 3rd level of of SM City Cebu.

Thirty-seven oil paintings by native Peruvians depicting religious themes, acquired and collected by AMC board member Clodoveo “Louie” Nacorda in the mid-2000s while in the United States, will be on display, and out of this, 26 will be up for grabs by open bidding. The proceeds of the auction will benefit the Archdiocesan Museum of Cebu, the former Cathedral Museum of Cebu.

Open bidding will immediately commence after the viewing and will run until the end of the exhibition, which is next Friday. An interested bidder can see who are bidding and for how much through a clipboard placed near the painting where one must write one’s name and the bid amount and then sign it. One can return from time to time the whole week to see the progress of the bids and to increase one’s bid. Bids will close before the end of the exhibition week.

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It was quite awe-inspiring to join movie-goers clapping their hands after watching “Heneral Luna” last Saturday.

I had finally put to bed the main chapters of the upcoming coffee table book entitled “The War in Cebu” and it was a good day to watch a movie about heroism and the failings of a nation. I was not disappointed. The movie portrayed Emilio Aguinaldo as an inutile head of a dwindling republic full of opportunists, emergent capitalists represented by Felipe Buencamino and Pedro Paterno.

Call them pragmatists but at the end of the day, they were motivated by nothing more than self-interest. Faced with the daunting possibility of a prolonged war, their machinations to end it vis-à-vis General Antonio Luna’s bold actuations of using the war as a platform to assert discipline among the ranks and sovereignty among the people surely hit everyone watching that movie with me, even as we ponder how we will wage against China as it grabs our islands left and right.

I wonder now on hindsight how many of us who watched that movie will begin to change our ways and start thinking not of our own personal, selfish selves but of this country and what we can do collectively to move it forward (when we can’t even solve a simple problem like traffic congestion!).

Now comes calls for a movie about Cebu’s own revolutionary, actually one we borrowed briefly (and then killed shortly) from Bacong, Negros Oriental, by the name of Leon Kilat or Pantaleon Villegas. I join that call and urge my friends like the award-winning director Remton Zuasola and the award-winning musical scorer Lucien Letaba to come together and work on this project.

“Heneral Luna” was propelled to multimillion-peso success at the box office because of the support it got from the SM Group which opened its cinemas to the movie, offered generous discounts to students and from the thousands of teachers who required their students and pupils—and in turn, their parents—to watch the movie.

That same formula for success can still be harnessed in the making of a movie about Leon Kilat. There are lessons we can learn from that brief period when Cebuanos—well at least the poor and the manual laborers—rose up in arms against Spanish colonial rule, albeit much later than the Tagalogs in Manila, and then fought against American rule. Those lessons may be a repetition of

Heneral Luna’s frustrations but how they played out in Cebu and in Carcar, where Leon Kilat was slaughtered, and why, are important for this and the coming generations to ponder upon.

Are we really doomed as a people to kill our own hopes for the future, our own heroes who risk lives and limbs to attain high ideals? Are we really self-interested brutes too greedy to rise above the personal?

Let Leon Kilat speak about us Cebuanos. And let us see how he weighs us in the balance the way the Tagalogs were when they slaughtered their very own Heneral.