A black horse and a white horse collide in a sugarcane field.

Some men cut the reeds with a scythe and blood comes out, spraying their faces.

We are in Maguindanao, a Muslim autonomous region of the Philippines.

Mangindra wakes up from sleep, this violent dream has accompanied her during the night.

Her son Abdel has squandered his savings on gambling and still bets on fierce horse fights, while Jasim has kept his possessions, has family and land.

His mother tries to reconcile them and asks the latter to help Abdel and return him to the land. She does not want what she remembers from the dream where her dead father asked one of them to go with him to happen...

Therefore, she wants to honor her husband with a kanduli, an offering that will restore energy for the children's reconciliation.

The two sons are at odds over a piece of land but the tribe manages to help resolve the issue.

Imam meanwhile makes the brothers swear that the dispute will not continue, yet an unexpected government intervention puts the entire province in a state of extreme violence.

Mendoza, divides the narrative into two parts:

in this film he narrates the controversy surrounding the tragedy of SAF ( Special Action Force) 44 in 2015 from the point of view of a Maguindanaoan family, while the other film Bansa is about the point of view of the SAF survivors.

All were victims of what happened there.

Here it recounts the Mamasapano massacre committed on Jan. 25, 2015 in the Philippine town of the same name, following a clash between Philippine National Police (SAF) special forces and the MILF and BIFF Islamist terrorist groups.

In the film, the brothers' father reappears more than once with continuous flashbacks to harken back to past sacrifices and the threat of history returning and repeating itself.

A sort of new Cain/Jasim, older brother, responsible worker while Abel/Abdel carefree and unreliable player.

All told with Mendoza's masterful cinematography, the torn faces and wheat fields that fill with soldiers and bullets amid bodies and blood to the cry of Allah Akbar.

The story of a family, a mother's love and a massacre are concentrated in eighty minutes of violence and screams as the finale closes with a lament for all the victims on the island of Mindanao.

Tragic, poetic, symbolic: the metaphor of a world opens and closes again a cross-section of socio-historical reality: Mendoza confirms himself as a master and rips again the veil of cinematic aletheia.

17-Apr-2024 by Beatrice