Anacbanua (The Child of the Sun)
Written, produced, directed, and edited by Pangasinan filmmaker Christopher Gozum, the experimental film won the Digital Lokal Lino Brocka Grand Prize as well as the Digital Lokal Best Director Award during the 11th Cinemanila International Film Festival in October 2009. It is the first full-length digital feature film in the Pangasinan language with English subtitles.
Synopsis: A middle class and Western-educated poet (Umaanlong) returns to the Pangasinan region, the land of his birth and his ancestors from which he was uprooted for a very long time. He is sick with a lingering physical, mental and spiritual illness. He meets the Musia (Muse) who takes care of him during his illness. The Musia performs a series of rituals that identifies the cause of the Umaanlong’s disease and appeases the ancestral and nature spirits inhabiting sacred spaces in Pangasinan’s physical landscape. While in half-sleep, the Umaanlong’s soul leaves his diseased body. The soul flight transports the Umaanlong to places and time zones in Pangasinan’s landscape and history where he undergoes cosmic immersion, a deep and intense spiritual experience for chosen people like him where the self gets absorbed in the universe. The Umaanlong discovers the Ogaw (child) who serves as a spirit guide in his magical journey. In this cosmic immersion, the Umaanlong undergoes a series of gradual and violent transformations similar to the fermentation of fish sauce, slaughtering of livestock, pounding and shaping of burning metal rods in the anvil, the moulding of the clay into pottery, and the baking of the moist bricks in the fire of the kiln. These series of rituals are tests a novice undergoes when he is called and destined to serve his people. Through this soul travel, the uprooted poet reclaims his primal and ancestral connection to the water (danum), to the land (uma), and to the people (katooan), key figures that mark Pangasinan’s landscape, history and identity. Like his ancestors who belonged to the exclusive ranks of traditional healers, storytellers, and wise leaders in the ancient communities of Pangasinan, the Umaanlong completes these series of difficult tests in a novice’s initiation. The Umaanlong returns to the real world offering himself and his art towards the humanistic progress of his community and the people of Pangasinan. In this renewed and higher state of being, the Umaanlong reunites and becomes one with the Musia.
