Toni Go-Yadao

Ten theater artists took the challenge to record their daily lives by making video diaries and conversations during the pandemic lockdown. Despite how bleak the pandemic was, it brought them to listen to their bodies, minds and hearts. This documentary is a tapestry of video snapshots from the lives of 10 Filipino theater artists during the height of the pandemic lockdown. The artists tell their stories mostly through video diaries using phone cameras to record their daily lives, their feelings and thoughts, while locked in their homes with no work, no income, and with a sense that their country is going to pieces. Conversations with the filmmaker via Zoom were also recorded. It provides a perspective on how theater artists found ways and means to survive, to take care of their mental health, and even break protocols to persist in their advocacies.

Tomas, the old venerable mayor of the remote town of Kawalan, learns that the invading Japanese will set up a garrison there. He organizes willing members in his community to set up a hidden settlement in the middle of the forest, where they can live unaffected by the horrors of war. As a young revolutionary during the 1896 fight against Spain and then as a soldier fighting against the Americans, Tomas had witnessed the effects of violence on people and become a pacifist. Now, he must see if inhabitants of the hidden settlement can escape the sufferings wrought by the war.