Rumaragasa

The lush but troubled landscape of mid-1990s Sibuyan Island in the Philippines. Eli is a reserved young man carrying the weight of a trauma that his community refuses to acknowledge. After surviving a sexual assault by a peer, an event dismissed by local authorities and friends as nothing more than rough play, he retreats into a world of silence and isolation. When he witnesses a mysterious plane crash in the island’s densely forested mountains, his attempt to alert others is met with the same incredulity that greeted his earlier disclosure. In his solitude, Eli clings to fragments of sound and memory – often via the cassette tapes he carries with him – as he searches for some means of expression and truth. As the film unfolds, the personal and the communal collide: Eli’s internal unravelling mirrors the larger spectre of the environmental exploitation that is threatening his hometown. What begins as a quiet examination of one individual’s anguish evolves into a parable about how silence and denial can corrode both human lives and the natural world that sustains them.