Goyo

By TBA STUDIOS

Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral is a coming-of-age story about how a young, overconfident boy learns to accept his own mortality and, more importantly, his duties as a true soldier of the Republic." – Jerrold Tarog, director of Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral

History lessons have ingrained in Filipinos the heroism of the boy general Gregorio del Pilar, famed for the Battle in Tirad Pass. But the ideals that spur a revolution are as complex as the motivations of this young man to pursue greatness.

This compendium brings together the process of making the movie from its director, producers and screenwriter, and an interview with Bulacan historian Isagani Giron that looks into the writings of Teodoro Kalaw and Nick Joaquin. It invites thoughtful scrutiny of a flawed young man and a deeper reflection of Philippine history in hopes of a more meaningful understanding of ourselves as a people and as a nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9789712735097

Book preview

Introduction

Naked in the Sun was a film on the life of Gregorio Del Pilar that was never made. Its title referred to the sorry description of Del Pilar’s corpse left on the battlefield in his underwear. His military uniform, boots, and personal effects were pilfered by the enemy and kept as war booty. And then, depending on the source you are reading, Del Pilar’s remains were buried a day or two afterwards by his comrades or by an enemy officer who honored the fallen general with a tombstone that read An officer and a gentleman. His remains were located in 1930 through Igorots in his service, exhumed and positively identified from his dental records: gold fillings made during his exile in Hong Kong and an extra tooth that was a distinguishing physical feature described in Tagalog as sungki. These remains have since disappeared.

History is made lively by having more than one version of the story, and Del Pilar’s tragic death, made heroic by cinema, paintings, and textbook history over the past eight decades, is not as clear-cut as we would want to believe, because it is remembered in four different primary sources, by four different eyewitnesses: two Americans say he was shot while astride his white horse, a Filipino officer says he was shot just as he was about to mount the horse, while a Spanish officer has him killed standing on the ground. 

Jerrold Tarog had Heneral Goyo, as he was called by his men, as a minor character in his surprising blockbuster Heneral Luna (2015). Three years later, he completed a sequel, Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral, and one would think that the renewed research would reveal more than what we know at present, largely from the short biography Gregorio H. del Pilar: El heroe de Tirad (1930) by Teodoro M. Kalaw who had access not just to primary source materials but to people who had known Goyo personally. This book contains a lengthy interview with Isagani Giron who cites and summarizes all known secondary sources in an engaging read that underscores the need for further primary-source research in the mass of documents on the Philippine Revolution and the First Republic now preserved in the National Library of the Philippines. 

Originally known as the Philippine Insurgent Records, this archive, now labeled as the Philippine Revolutionary Records, surely contains documents on Goyo that we don’t know about. It has been over three decades since I went over a bound batch of faded papers in pencil, in Goyo’s own hand, that were dismissed by Capt. John R. M. Taylor, compiler of the Insurgent Records, with a handwritten note on the cover: Withdrawn from PA 84. Drafts of love letters of Gen. Gregorio Del Pilar—no interest here. Goyo’s love interest is a woman whose identity eludes us but for her nickname Poleng. What was irrelevant to Taylor is relevant to Filipinos in the twenty-first century. Then there is the unpublished correspondence between Goyo and Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera preserved in the Rizal Library of the Ateneo de Manila University, probably pertaining to the failed peace negotiations between the Filipino and American forces in 1899. Surely there is more Goyo material lying around, waiting to be discovered.

Each generation writes its own history, based on the materials at hand, colored by the context of the historian’s lens and time. Goyo’s life and times seem like tired old questions that elicit new and engaging answers. We can only hope this little book, a movie-tie in, will not be the last word on Goyo—Batang Heneral at Bayani.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

Ateneo de Manila University

19 June 2018, Jose Rizal’s 157th birthday

Director’s Notes

by Jerrold Tarog

I’ve gone on record several times about how I set aside Heneral Luna in 2012 because I thought it was a highly improbable project. Having rewritten E. A. Rocha and Henry Francia’s screenplay, I was prepared to accept that the whole thing might not come to life. We were unlikely to find financing, the logistics would be a nightmare, and the audience for it, while certainly out there, would not be enough to assure a return of investment given how hard it was to keep an independent film in theaters for a week. Then we met Fernando Ortigas, and I was proven wrong on all counts. We got the film made and it was released in September 2015. One month later, people were still lining up to see it. Then it became a pop-culture phenomenon. It was so surreal that I’m still processing the entire thing to this day.

We didn’t go into the project blindly. I had a clear objective: to make historical movies exciting again. I wanted the film to be funny, irreverent, poignant, controversial, borderline offensive and, most importantly, something that feels personal to most Filipinos who are going to see it. I wanted it to be as much about the audience as it is about Antonio Luna. We Filipinos are so hungry to define who and what we are as a people, so I wanted to make a film that gave the audience space and fuel to reflect on these matters that raised questions instead of provided answers.

But film is a medium of omission. There is a natural tendency to stuff a story with facts, inventions, emotions, and details. However, effective storytelling means you’re going to have to whittle everything down to the story’s essence. You find the film’s spine and you align all your cinematic tools and tricks to make sure you travel along its curvature. You limit your point of view and streamline the narrative. Everything else belongs to the compost heap of forgotten drafts, deleted scenes, muted voices, and shelved ideas. This means Heneral Luna was never going to be a comprehensive film about the Philippine-American War, our leaders and oppressors, our victories and failures. It was going to focus on a few things and leave out other perspectives and narratives.

This is where Goyo comes in. During Luna’s preproduction, we were already setting the thing up for sequels. A few actors came in to audition for the Del Pilar role, and I told them the boy-general was only going to have a cameo. But if Luna succeeded, the next film would be about Del Pilar. Having focused on a character (Luna) who stood in direct opposition to Aguinaldo, the next film should focus on someone who was on Aguinaldo’s side. Then perhaps we could even dream of a third film that gave both sides a larger stage to battle it out, so we can show how complicated history and politics are, and how these matters should be viewed beyond concepts of oppressor and oppressed, conqueror and conquered, good and bad. Nobody thinks they’re the villain in their own life story.

I didn’t know Gregorio Del Pilar was going to be a challenging character to bring to life. It’s not because he was such a complicated character with so much nuance and complexity, it was the opposite: there wasn’t a lot about him that made for interesting storytelling. Teodoro Kalaw’s book, An Acceptable Holocaust: The Life and Death of a Boy-General, contains more than enough material about Del Pilar for a movie, but none of the details in the book were compelling to me. I’d decided early on that the boy-general would be the sequel’s protagonist because he was colorful by reputation, but when I dove into the research, I found out the accounts were thick on heroism but thin on human conflict. Goyo, as Gregorio was fondly called, was a handsome man who wooed ladies left and right. He had a lot of swashbuckling adventures as a boy and as a young adult fighting against Spain. He became a general in his early twenties then died defending the president from the Americans in Tirad Pass. All that sounds heroic indeed, but so what? Why bother putting that up on screen when all it does is reinforce

Reviews for Goyo

[Bhernadette Pascual · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book ? I love the storytelling and the content itself