How He Died is Not Controversial Master Copy (2024) Gio Lingao

“Language was always the companion of empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall.” - Antonio de Nebrija Synopsis: Days after the 2022 Philippine elections, a filmmaker lies to the police about making a film, just when a protest was put to a halt. Upon the retrieval of his deleted recordings of landscapes, some Filipino children began to experience a spectral figure from the dark side of history — which have taken away their ability to read and speak, and their innate sense of local language, as vengeful spirits escape and are reborn through an oceanarium underground somewhere in Manila. Director’s Statement: From the totalization of landscapes (fûkeiron) to the internal crisis among the youth. This film is a response to the Philippines’ dark side of history and to fascist regimes. With another Marcos and Duterte elected into power, and having been red-tagged as a terrorist by the police days after the 2022 Philippine elections. The filmmaker merges his personal archive (of recorded videos, sounds, and images) from the last 10 to 14 years of his life with stolen media footage of his nation’s political history found on the public surface online. Reimagined and fictionalized into an autobiographic sapient cinema for Filipino children growing up in a new age of spectral state surveillance and political violence, as imposed by the Anti-Terror law of 2020. A controversial law signed by Rodrigo Duterte during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — which violates and silences the people’s human rights to political resistance in the Philippines.