58th

A moving account of the horrific 2009 Maguindanao massacre in the Philippines, approached from a personal angle. Nenen is the daughter of a photojournalist whose corpse was never found – so his death is officially unacknowledged. Carl Joseph E. Papa uses animation to transform the documentary material.

In 2009 Esmael Mangudadatu, a progressive political candidate in the Philippines, sent his wife and a team of journalists to the town of Maguindanao to file his application to become Governor. Everyone in the convoy was brutally slaughtered by forces directed by the powerful Ampatuan family, which was allied to the oppressive Arroyo government. 58th retells this tragic tale through the memories of the daughter of a photojournalist nicknamed Bebot, and her tireless campaign to find proof and seek official acknowledgement of her father’s death in the massacre. Even though justice was partly served by the courts in 2020, Bebot’s absence from the historical record continues to haunt his family.

Yet this is by no means a conventional documentary. While making extensive use of TV newsreel footage, Carl Joseph Papa (The Missing, IFFR 2024) transforms his accumulated research (including Skype interviews) into animation, allowing him to dramatise unrecorded events. Most touchingly, this creative approach opens the door to lyrical imagining of times past, present and future.

– Adrian Martin 

Trailer

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