Tikoy Aguiluz (1952 - 2024)

AS Tikoy Aguiluz put it, he grew up in a penitentiary (the Davao Penal Colony, or Depacol, where his father was prison auditor), learning how to box from one of the veteran convicts. With his six other brothers, all of them wearing shorts instead of long pants and speaking in a funny Tagalog accent instead of everyday Visayan, they attracted the attention and ridicule of all the other kids, not necessarily starting fights but finishing them wherever they went. Tikoy’s ambition in life was simple: to get a tattoo, and be a gangster; he ended up working briefly in Hollywood, then coming back to the Philippines to become one of the finest filmmakers in the industry.

You might say his youth in Davao was the root of Tikoy’s take-no-prisoners attitude. He played the game of kissass poorly; he could be charming when he wanted, but had little patience for the incompetent or mediocre. When his debut feature Boatman (1984) became a smash hit, in the one theater in the Philippines that could screen the film without cuts (the infamous Manila Film Center that Imelda Marcos quickly erected, at the expense of construction workers still buried in its concrete), the offers came right and left to make Boatman 2. Tikoy dug in his heels and said no; he wanted to do something completely different — a series of well-written well-directed lowbudget productions that would make their money back in cable. He looked for projects; did a documentary on Balweg (Father Balweg, Rebel Priest); after the 1986 EDSA Revolution he tried to develop a biopic on Ninoy Aquino.

Boatman (1984). First film I ever saw from the filmmaker was Boatman (1984). I remember how the whole film seemed to take place at night; how the toreros — live sex performers — having sex on a low cushioned platform with the audience sitting within arm’s reach; how unbelievably beautiful Sarsi Emmanuelle was (toreros were usually prostitutes too old or worn to make their living on the street), yet how effortlessly natural. I remember the circular narrative — how the film opens with the tip of Felipe’s (Felipe Paningbayan’s) little member trimmed in a rite of passage (chewing guava leaves for anesthetic), traces the boy’s rise from Pagsanjan rapids tour guide (now played by Ronnie Lazaro) to torero to lover of a powerful ganglord’s mistress — and closes with altogether more radical surgery.

I was 18, barely of legal age, in a standing-room only crowd (might have been standing myself, or perched on the aisle steps); afterwards I stepped out of the cool dark into the broiling Manila Bay sun thoroughly shaken — could they just do that to people? Of course they could, and worse.

Bagong Bayani (1995). For almost 10 years I didn’t hear anything about the neophyte filmmaker; then the Flor Contemplacion case — a Filipina maid arrested in Singapore for murder — broke, and a docudrama (Bagong Bayani [Unsung Heroine]) was made on her life. I had started writing for The Manila Chronicle and attended a screening in the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). The film impressed me: the low-budget aesthetic, the unfussy unactorly cast (Helen Gamboa as a very human Flor, Chanda Romero as an intense Delia Maga, Irma Adlawan as a warm supportive Virginia Parumog), the documentary footage which rounded out the story and gave the film wider context.

Tikoy initially planned a drama based on footage he shot — interviews of Flor’s family, demonstrations demanding Flor’s release — but events leaped ahead of him; Flor had been hanged. Viva Films announced a big movie on Flor’s life and recruited the Contemplacion family, who promptly shut Tikoy out; he had little beyond the interviews and demonstration footage. “Finishing that film was one of the most difficult things I ever did,” he said. “Whenever I have a hard time on a project now, I tell myself ‘No matter how bad things get, they can’t be as bad as when I made Bagong Bayani.”

So he shot what he could from what little he scraped together, and when he stepped into the editing room he “didn’t have a main character... didn’t have a script... didn’t have half the scenes needed to tell the story properly. So I decided to base the film’s structure on The Meaning of Life.”

I thought I misheard. “You mean Monty Python? And Now For Something Completely Different?” Tikoy grinned: “Dramatizations connected by documentary footage and the occasional video clip. I finished the film.”

I wrote on the film and recommended it to the Hong Kong International Film Festival. By this point Tikoy was at a low ebb; he had sold property, taken out loans, hocked everything he could; he finished first, but because Viva’s was a multimillion peso studio production (with no less than superstar Nora Aunor as Flor) and Tikoy’s was a no-budget docudrama, every theater in Metro Manila refused the latter because they wanted the former (which, surprise surprise, did big box-office). Tikoy managed to arrange screenings at the CCP and the University of the Philippines but that was it; he was stuck with a film that cost a good chunk of his personal finances with zero prospects. The Hong Kong Film Festival invite felt like a godsent opportunity.

(Or so Tikoy said; of course it’s possible he was being kind, as the film screened in Fribourg the week before Hong Kong — though invitations and screenings tend to follow a schedule all their own — but in lieu of stronger contrary evidence I’ll go with what he told me.)

Segurista (1996). Call it a pivot, or an offer Tikoy couldn’t refuse, but the filmmaker’s next project was with the aforementioned Viva Films. Segurista (Dead Sure) is an erotic noir about an insurance saleswoman who at night doubled as a GRO (Guest Relations Officer) at a high-class karaoke bar. An aspiring capitalist, Karen (Michelle Aldana), applying the concept of synergy, uses her late-night job to meet wealthy men, selling them life insurance and collecting fat commissions. Brilliant concept, and so logical one wonders why it hasn’t been done before (turns out it has: the story is based on a case that reportedly happened in Hong

Kong).