An elderly couple in puffy, glistening jackets stroll along a seaside boardwalk on a wintry day. In a forlorn café, they sit gazing through rain-speckled windows at the icy sea. On a canal, they visit a cartoonish replica Noah’s Arc sporting slight, mischievous grins. Ascending the deck, husband and wife dutifully trod a maze of wooden ramps designed for hoards of tourists who are nowhere to be found. The couple are exiles, banished for the past thirty-seven years to lonesome, dreary Europe from the revolutionary Third World.
They are Jose Maria Sison and Julie de Lima, known by some as “the Philippines’ most famous leftist couple,” and they are the subjects of the delightful, stirring new documentary My Friend the Terrorist. Sison, a university professor, has been called “the Che Guevara of the Philippines.” In 1969, Sison founded both the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army. The latter has waged guerilla warfare against US imperialism and the capitalist Philippine state ever since. My Friend the Terrorist swings potently between vignettes of Sison and de Lima’s placid, solitary life in Utrecht and convivial scenes from the hectic shared life of the autonomous territories currently held by the New People’s Army.
Julieta de Lima and Jose Maria Sison have photo taken with Johan Huibers (centre), who built a full-scale interpretation of the biblical Ark.
The latter are the true heart of the documentary. Through one-on-one interviews and group shots of community celebrations, military drills, and medical clinics we meet a quirky, earnest community of armed struggle walking the road that Sison and de Lima helped make for them decades ago. Far from dogmatic or domineering, the film makes the communist revolution in the Philippines seem flexible, useful, and resonant. People are making it their own. “There are lots of Indigenous women taking up arms because they are being exploited, like our Mamanwa tribe,” says a young paramedic. “I took up the challenge to heed the call of the people’s revolution so I would be able to stand up for my dignity as an Indigenous person and help my own people, the Lumads.” Another interlocutor, sitting with her husband and infant child, speaks of struggle as a way of life that spans generations. “As parents who are revolutionaries, what we wish for our children, who, like us, are victims of exploitation and oppression, is that they be part of the movement for liberation, that they too become revolutionaries,” she says. “Our challenge to the children who can understand, is to take the road that we have built for them.” As Sison and de Lima tinker quietly in grim surroundings, the matter of roads – and bridges – looms large.
To be sure, we do see present-day Sison and de Lima engaged politically – attending peace talks, making political speeches into their computer cameras. But it is tempting to translate their exile as something that tethers them to a past moment of struggle. Of the several love stories the film – billed as “a tale of love and revolution” – beguilingly tells, the one that comes across most poignantly is not the romance between Sison and de Lima.
It is the love story between Sison and de Lima on one hand, and the younger revolutionaries of the Philippines, on the other. The final scenes of the film are dedicated to heartfelt messages of gratitude transmitted to Utrecht from the autonomous territories. The footage leaves us with the distinct, exhilarating feeling that a revolution can be something that exceeds a mere decade, generation, or even one long lifetime. After witnessing the commitment of the young guerillas to the ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that Sison and de Lima left for them, it begins to seem that a revolutionary period often relegated to the 1960s and 1970s may only be getting started.
By Owen Toews**
December 11, 2024
**Owen Toews lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a descendent of Russian Mennonites. He was trained as a geographer at the City of New York Graduate Center and is the author of the award-winning work of non-fiction Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg. His other works include a novel, Island Falls.
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