‘Moro’: Busan Review

Dir: Brillante Ma Mendoza. The Philippines. 2023. 80mins

The love-hate tug between two warring brothers allows Brillante Ma Mendoza to confront bigger divisions in his native Philippines. The visceral, staccato storytelling of Moro effectively blends the personal and political in a lament for the families caught up in the conflicts on the country’s southern island of Mindanao. A taut, compact drama should attract Mendoza’s regular audience and beyond. 

Has the vivid impact of a charcoal drawing

Inspired by true events, Moro started shooting in 2019 when it was known as ’Bangsmoro’. Halted during the country’s pandemic lockdown, it emerges as more topical than ever given the current possibility of Mindanao being granted an autonomous Muslim government. The Philippines is a largely Christian country but the 5-6% Muslim population have long struggled for rights and recognition.

Moro begins with a blood-soaked dream that leaves Mangindra (Laurice Guillen) fearing for the lives of her two sons Jasim (Piolo Pascual) and Abdel (Baron Geisler). The nightmare vision of her dead husband stretching out a hand to Abdel is particularly troubling. The husband re-appears throughout the film, symbolising past sacrifices and the threat of history repeating. Flashbacks are elegantly folded into the narrative, as characters walk into the frame of haunting memories from their past.

Startled by her visions, Mangindra decides to honour her husband with a kanduli (offering) and sets her energies towards reconciling her sons. The Cain and Abel-like brothers have very different personalities. We first see Abdel betting on a vicious fight between two horses; he is carefree, unreliable and an inveterate gambler, and Baron Geisler plays him with an easygoing charm. Jasim is older and more serious-minded, initially seen hard at work on a market stall, and Piolo Pascual conveys the weary, stern-faced exasperation of someone who has been obliged to assume responsibility for the family. Resentment of his brother carries a righteous anger. When the two come to blows, a screaming Jasim is so incensed that he suffers a crippling bout of lockjaw. 

The film falls into two halves. The first follows Mangindra’s efforts to reconcile the brothers, while the second focuses on the battles between government forces and the Muslim guerrilla fighters who count Abdel and Jasim among their numbers. Mendoza’s urgent, flowing camerawork closely shadows soldiers and fighters as they weave through the jungles and cornfields with bullets flying and casualties rising. He emphasises the senseless slaughter with bodies ripped apart and limbs torn from flesh. The fierce bursts of fighting, jungle landscapes and eerily beautiful rivers can’t help but recall Apocalypse Now, which Coppola filmed in The Philippines in the 1970s. 

Moro almost feels as if a more expansive, Coppola-sized epic has been pared down to its essentials with viewers required to keep up with the punchy, broad-brushstrokes storytelling. Events rush past, the military presence is ever present in checkpoints and pronouncements, Abdel and Jasim become figures in the landscape and pawns in a national fight. Mendoza and cinematographer Odyssey M. Flores construct some notable images as a drone shot allows us to look down on soldiers snaking through swaying cornfields, an oxen pulls a cart neatly piled high with body bags or we are guided through the aftermath of violence marked by severed limbs scattered across bone dry ground.

Tightly focused at just eighty minutes, Moro has the vivid impact of a charcoal drawing. Two songs performed direct to camera book-end the film and underline the lamentation for all the losses suffered in the name of Mindanao.