“I wonder if we are stuck in bad movie plots we make ourselves,” says Magsalin, the character at the centre of Gina Apostol’s thrillingly imagined and provocative inquiry into the nature of stories and the unfolding of history in our collective consciousness. The remark is made in one of many terse conversations she has with an American film-maker, Chiara Brasi, who has come to the Philippines to shoot a movie based on her father’s experience in the 1970s of making a film about a notorious massacre of 1901.
Magsalin reads Chiara’s script and objects not just to the accuracy of certain details and the viewpoints it adopts, but to the very motivation behind it. A Filipina translator and mystery writer on her first visit to her home country after many years in New York, she decides to put things right by writing her own script. In this jostle for primacy, narrative strands collide, history doubles back on itself, characters real and imagined merge into one version of events, only to be pulled apart again by Magsalin’s constant interrogation of Chiara’s – and her own – understanding of the history of the Philippines.
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