VERDICT: A young woman navigates the Cordilleran highlands to seek fame in the big city in Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan’s mysterious, Western-tinged drama.
The destination is left unstated when Lynn (Ammin Acha-ur) departs her family home on a perilous horseback journey across the mountains in Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan’s The Headhunter’s Daughter. She is a lonesome rider on a quest the audience won’t come to understand until near the film’s climax, but her expedition through the grand landscapes and township edgelands of the post-colonial Philippines is evocative and gripping.
Lynn is curiously anachronistic. It’s the designer sportswear coat she wears alongside her more traditional stockman’s hat or the polyester tent she sits outside singing old-fashioned songs in the light of a crackling campfire. She seems authentic but somehow cast out of time, and this sensation is intensified by the affected cowboy threads adorning the patrons of a saloon-style bar she eventually visits. We come to understand that her pilgrimage was to the city of Baguio to audition for a reality TV show about country singing, but the film continues to retain an air of metaphysical and emotional mystery that invests even such scenes with potency.
Eblahan perfectly withholds information so that ambiguities enrich rather than undermine the integrity of this brief, contained story. Unanswered questions suggest a more expansive, unravelling narrative beyond the horizon, without making us long too much for it. The longing instead resides within Lynn, who seems to be seeking a way to reconnect with her father – the eponymous headhunter whose brief appearances suggest another character unmoored somewhat in time. All of this is reflected in Acha-ur’s sonorous and soulful voice, which weaves into the film’s make-up a beautifully elegiac quality that chimes both with its genre trappings and its recreation of a complex indigenous experience of the present-day Philippines.
Director, screenplay, cinematography, editor: Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan Cast: Ammin Acha-ur, Pablo Quintos Producer: Hannah Schierbeek Music: Ammin Acha-ur, Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan Production companies: Prima Materia Pictures (Philippines) Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Short Film Program) In Ilokano 15 minutes
