REVIEW: 'Ganggang' is a reckoning with the violence we inherit
In the countryside, old conflicts have a way of outliving the people who began them. The tension between soldiers, farmers, and activists has long been written into the country’s history in blood, suspicion, and grief. Ganggang gives these forces human faces, but it is most interested in those who inherit the wounds they leave behind.
The film follows Ilay and Ten-ten, two schoolboys who repeatedly lose spider-fighting matches to Anton, the school bully. When Mel, a newcomer from the city, enters their world, the three form an unlikely friendship and set out to find a spider strong enough to finally beat him.
During their search, however, tensions begin to surface, testing their friendship and exposing them to harsher realities they are still too young to fully understand.
In the hands of another filmmaker, the story might have remained a simple parable. But writer-director JL Burgos knows this terrain far too intimately. His brother, Jonas Burgos, has been missing since he was abducted in broad daylight almost two decades ago. Burgos therefore approaches stories of disappearances, violence, and human rights abuses not as distant political abstractions, but as wounds that have entered his own family.
That intimacy gives Ganggang its force. Burgos juxtaposes the seeming innocence of spider fighting with the larger power struggles surrounding the children. The story is told through those whose parents have been drawn into these conflicts: the sons of a soldier, a farmer, and the desaparecidos.
The film is also filled with echoes of real people and actual cases. A teacher named Rebelyn recalls Rebelyn Pitao, who was abducted and killed in 2009. Other names invoke victims of summary executions. Even the plate number seen in the opening scene mirrors that of the vehicle linked to the abduction of Jonas Burgos in 2007. These details keep the film from drifting too comfortably into allegory. They remind us that behind every metaphor is someone who actually disappeared, someone who was killed, and someone left waiting.
This is where Ganggang is most effective. It puts faces to people we too often encounter only as names in headlines or numbers in reports. It shows how power, once consumed by suspicion, can manufacture threats where none may exist. Violence then begins to justify more violence, until nobody remembers where the cycle started, only that another generation has inherited it.
By the time the film closes with the powerful Isang Minutong Katahimikan by poet, musician, and human rights activist Ericson Acosta, who was killed during a military operation in 2022, everything we have watched takes on the weight of history, and punches the gut as we realize that none of this belongs safely in the past.
Disclaimer: PhilSTAR L!fe was given a complimentary ticket to watch Ganggang, an official full-length entry at the 22nd Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival running until Aug. 18. Watch the official teaser below.