Emerald Flaviano Manlapaz
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Karihatag is a place between mountain and sea, and if one climbs high enough up a mountainside, one can see across the rippling waves below and clean through the light to where the sea meets the sky. Perhaps people in Karihatag, at some point in their lives, look up at the sky and out to the sea—not to discern whether a storm is coming and whether tomorrow early morning will be a good time to set out with their nets in their fishing boats—but in wonder.
Atienza first came to Karihatag in 2014 to photograph the community for an NGO, who wanted to find out how the people set up a marine sanctuary and how they survive during typhoon season. She first met Reyboy then, who showed her around Karihatag. Very curious about her work, he struck her as a precocious child. Reyboy pulled her back to Karihatag, and Atienza returned in 2018 to make a documentary focused on the boy, as he was about to leave his hometown to study high school in a bigger town.
But it is not entirely Reyboy that we get; the last days at sea can very well be Atienza’s as well. This is obvious in how Karihatag is framed as a place of idyllic childhood. Of course Reyboy, who has never been away from the place where he was born, does not yet realize its beauty. Instead it is Atienza’s longing gaze that coheres the place, her voice that cuts through. She casts Karihatag’s common beauty, its unhurried provincial life, with a determinedly pastoral gaze: the sky bursts into soft fires at dusk and stars puncture the night as points of light overhead. Blessed afternoon light caresses sleeping figures—filmy curtains blowing in a gentle breeze, a kitten making biscuits in its sleep, Reyboy dozing on a sofa. It is Atienza’s urgency to capture Reyboy’s departure that drives the documentary, her need to give his leaving symbolic weight. And to signal his growth out of childhood with his departure, it is necessary to mark the place that represents his childhood—or at least the feeling that Atienza associates with it, remembered through conversations with Reyboy—and render it pristine and separate.
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Karihatag is a place between mountain and sea, but Atienza does not let us go much further than this. It is somewhere at least where people speak Visayan. (Karihatag is one of the barangays of Malimono, Surigao del Norte.) Most of the livelihoods of its people are dependent on fishing. Reyboy’s favorite thing about the sea of his childhood, the “pasig”, an underwater rock where the fish live, sends the film off into some exposition of Karihatag as an embodied place. It must be noted, however, that Atienza’s distanced voice narrates its story as if of a place lifted from myth, out of time, flattening its history and making Karihatag featureless. The community’s protection of the fish population near its coastline (hence the “pasig”) gestures at the people’s effort to look after future generations of Karihatag fisherfolk, even at the risk of losing their lives fishing in the open sea with their small motorized bangkas. But who will inherit the sea? Uncle Buboy has a son in the military, the one who has vowed never to be a fisherman like his father after being at sea in the middle of a storm. Atienza’s own dream for Reyboy to continue the work of living off and taking care of the sea is threatened by the world outside Karihatag and the person that Reyboy might become.
For Reyboy, through Atienza at least, is the ideal child—playful and dreaming. The sky above the sea is a constant haunt, a launching pad for flights of fancy. That the places that they go to and the turns in conversation were entirely determined by Reyboy comes as no surprise, though it is a wonder that a child, as he is, exists. This is his appeal to Atienza, and to us by extension. If Reyboy is aware of the precarity of their living in Karihatag, he does not show it, giving him a sort of vulnerability, a tenderness that makes one think he grew up cushioned by love and care. (He has an older brother who died as an infant, before Reyboy himself was born.)
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While Atienza’s melancholia is transparent from the beginning, scenes that imply Reyboy’s leaving and consequent change still strike as quite heavy-handed. A stark picture of Manila—or the city, in general—as the blighted place of greed and callousness can only complement the idealization of Karihatag—the rural village, in general—as the paradisaic home that can never be returned to. But this is perhaps the worst that can be said of Last Days at Sea. Atienza’s affection for Reyboy is generous and by no means patronizing, and their friendship stands on equal footing. Atienza made sure that Reyboy was comfortable with the project, even at the risk of exposing herself to critical scrutiny: in an interview, Atienza revealed that Reyboy was uncomfortable with being filmed alone, so she attached lavaliers on both Reyboy and herself and asked another member of her small crew to film in her stead— hence the conversations between Atienza and Reyboy around which much of the documentary revolved. And so, in effect, she is exposed doubly: during editing, Atienza confronted questions about how she connected with Reyboy throughout the filming process and realized how she looked to Reyboy to articulate a loss that she didn’t know existed—of wonder at the world, of a certain kind of courage. As the film unfolds, this bittersweet recognition is likewise revealed for its dependence on both Reyboy and Karihatag, taking literal form at one point in a dream of herself growing old while Reyboy remained the same. Atienza’s openness does take some bravery, but now she can, as Reyboy does, wish big again.