Bayaning 3rd World

Chonna Vae A. Cañete (reaction paper)

How far do we know Dr. Jose Rizal?

Bayaning Third World is a movie where two filmmakers are obsessed with doing a film about Jose Rizal, our Philippine National Hero. Their effort to explain the mysteries of the hero’s life lead them to confront the past and its characters. This movie sought questions which were never and will never be answered. The sort of questions where the answers were also buried six feet below the ground along with the national hero. It presented and created doubt in me about the real motive of the hero, and the main theme of the movie which caught my interest is about his retraction.

The movie presented the two sides of the coin, but no one can really say if the retraction is indeed genuine, if Josephine Bracken was really legally married to Rizal, or if indeed she is true in her feelings for him. These gray areas in Rizal’s life proved to be disturbing to me because I only had knowledge of these controversies when I was able to view the film. If Rizal did make the retraction, what made him do so? And if he didn’t made it, who forged his signature and made the retraction? So many questions kept plaguing my mind, the hardest part of which, no one could give the right answer for the people involved were already dead.

Though the movie used a technique wherein the filmmakers would re visit the past in order for it to appear more realistic, in the end, it did not give a definite and exact answer to the many questions involving Rizal. I guess that is what makes history a bit difficult. We only have the facts – the date, the people, the event, but we really don’t know the truth behind those facts. We don’t know what the truth behind Rizal is.

We can only assume and postulate the possibilities in the gray areas of his life. But we can never truly tell for sure who the real Dr. Jose Rizal is. Not all people are perfect I must say; Jose Rizal is one. His life is also full of mysteries needing...