Bunso

250

HUMAN SECURITY IN CONFLICT SITUATIONS

Bunso (The Youngest) . Directed by Ditsi Carolino. Philippines: Consuelo Foundation and the United Nations Children’s Fund, 2004. 63 minutes, Cebuano with English subtitles, color.

MA. AGNES A. PACULDAR

The power of form and visual images as captured in documentary films is manifested more strongly when used as a tool for popularizing social and political issues. Documentary films are therefore used as means to mobilize support needed in addressing critical yet often taken for granted issues that call for urgent and passionate response from the public. More importantly, they bring the audience face to face with these vexing, often vile realities. Beyond providing the audience an accurate picture, films of this genre succeed in evoking the appropriate sentiments to rally commitment behind certain advocacy objectives. They lay bare both the latent complexities and tragic elements of the issue and generate condemnation against the inaction of those who should be held accountable. Then they throw back to the viewers the same indictment, thus drawing from them a sense of self-denunciation for their own indifference. Ditsi Carolino’s Bunso undoubtedly accomplishes this feat. By far the best among local documentary filmmakers, Carolino employs the same thoughtfulness, honesty, straightforward and down-to-earth treatment of her subject combined with the technical fluency that made two of her earlier films, Minsan Lang Sila Bata (Children Only Once) and Riles (Life on the Tracks), effective rallying points for such issues as child labor and urban poverty. This time, she succeeds in giving faces and voices to the thousands of child prisoners in the country by exposing the gripping plight of juvenile offenders who are detained together with male adult inmates in the same prison cell. The film likewise makes a sharp visual statement of how the dire consequences of poverty intensify juvenile delinquency and violation of children’s...