Philippines vs. Spain Again?

On the day that my sister and I were going to watch Twilight, we got into the theater early enough to watch the trailers of upcoming movies.

One trailer in particular caught my eye, and it’s Baler, starring Anne Curtis and Jericho Rosales, as a Filipina and a Spanish soldier respectively. At first I thought this was just another movie about the Philippine Revolution. The idea seems a bore to me but the concept of an interracial romance (though not obvious since both actors are whiter than the average Filipino) is intriguing.

Since I saw the trailer, I’ve wanted to see the movie. I’ve long learned to not be so biased on the Filipino side of the Philippine Revolution (mind you, history books here are VERY biased). And since this movie features a love affair between a Filipino and a Spaniard, I thought this movie just might have a saving grace.

But soon after I’ve seen the trailer, my professor, who is a history enthusiast, mentioned that this “historical” movie, like its predecessors, seems to have been made with a minimal amount of research based on Filipino AND Spanish accounts of the Siege of Baler, which is the event that the movie was based on.

Now, I haven’t seen the movie yet but if I take my professor’s word for it, I think that would be unfair. What was the point of having a Spanish protagonist if that character would just be a token? I’m suddenly afraid that Jericho Rosales’s character would turn out to be getting himself on some damn moral dilemma about how wrong it would be if he keeps siding with his own countrymen.

Just, if Baler would become as historically biased as my prof says it is, then maybe the filmmakers would be missing the most important points about war.
There is no good or bad side in it. In the case of the Philippines versus Spain, it is only a matter of territorial, cultural, political dispute in which two peoples fight over a land that each claims to be its own. Yeah, the Spaniards never actually loved the Filipinos but it would be unfair to brand them as bad people just because of the atrocities they supposedly did to the Filipinos. But that’s not everything that they did.

The Spaniards unified the archipelago, brought Christianity and, in a way, helped develop Filipino culture as we know it today. Yeah, I would have to agree with another prof who once said that being colonized is like having a stranger ordering you around in your own household; but considering the benefits that the Spanish colonization brought to this country, I guess it’s only fair that we acknowledge and appreciate that.

Apparently, biased historians only cared about snooty Spaniards hitting indios with canes when they fail to greet the visitors, or Spanish priests raping native women. But we have to take note that just because some of them actually did those things doesn’t mean they all did. More importantly, it doesn’t automatically make them the villains of the story.

What do Spanish accounts say about the Siege of Baler or the Philippine Revolution in general? It seems reasonable we take those into account, too. But apparently, Filipinos would rather make themselves the victims all over again.

War doesn’t work that way. Each side might be fighting for what they think is right, but there will always be casualties. Whether one or the other is justified, we can never really tell unless we give each some consideration. Nonetheless people would die for a cause that they weren’t necessarily involved with. That’s the tragedy of war. There is no good and bad side to speak of, but people fight and kill nonetheless.

And as for the idea that Jericho Rosales’s character is a token: it could be that his character is used to show that not all Spaniards are bad. But if he’s the only one, that’s still not a good sign, don’t you think?