Fiction based on real stories – and especially ones that are of recent events – can easily fall into the trap of being like a cheap TV reenactment that seeks to teach the public a lesson or two about daily living. It also has to deal with an audience that has seen the same story unfold via sensationalist media, the kind that asks a mother who has lost a daughter to a freak accident: Ano pong pakiramdam ninyo ngayon?

All these come into play in watching “Bwaya” (written and directed by Francis Xavier Pasion). What surprises is that it seems oblivious to this dynamic, interweaving the documentary with the fiction. So it has interviews with the parents of the girl eaten by the crocodile Lolong in the Agusan Marsh, as well as footage of the exhumation and burial of the girl’s body. This was paralleled with a fictionalized representation of the same story.  (more…)