SUBJECTS of an award-winning film received threats from suspected State agents following screenings in two University of the Philippines (UP) campuses last October.
Producers of Cinemalaya 2025 best film Bloom Where You Are Planted demanded a stop on surveillance and harassment activities against documentary subjects Emilia Ventula and Gab Mesina.
“A few days after the sold-out screening at the UP Film Institute, Ventula received messages on her phone threatening financing terrorism charges if she refuses to become an intelligence asset,” the film’s Facebook page announced.
Messages from a certain Ramon Santos said Ventula must provide intelligence about her Cagayan and Manila-based colleagues to be spared from criminal charges.
Ventula received the text messages after returning home from the UP-Diliman screening where she was among the film’s talkback panelists.
She appeared in the film as a farmers’ group Amihan colleague of playwright and political detainee Amanda Lacaba Echanis who is one of three main subjects of the film.
Mesina on the other hand noticed “clear surveillance activities” against him by suspected intelligence agents after the film’s sold-out screening at UP Los Baños’ Pelikultura 2025 last month.
Mesina attended the screening’s talkback to call for junking of trumped-up charges against her mother and Makabayan-Cagayan Valley coordinator Agnes.
“The production team strongly condemns these attacks which only prove the State’s fright against the film’s message that activism is not terrorism,” the film’s producers said.
Bloom Where You Are Planted is about three Cagayan Valley activists Echanis, Agnes Mesina and Randy Malayao who suffered unrelenting persecution for their humanitarian work in the region.
Malayao was a National Democratic Front of the Philippines peace consultant when assassinated in January 2019. # (Raymund B. Villanueva)
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DISCLOSURE: The reporter is himself a subject of the film.
