K' na the Dreamweaver goes to UP Diliman

K'na the Dreamweaver is simply "bong nawa" (love).

I have fallen in love with the T'boli language since the day I started to study it in Linguistics. When one of my T'boli consultants shared with me the movie "K'na the Dreamweaver", which features an authentic T'boli language, I became ecstatic and first watched it during the Cinemalaya Festival in early August and the ending had made me cry. I watched it again last night with friends and with our adviser in celebration of the Indigenous People's Month at UP Film Center and equally enjoyed it. 

The story revolves around a young woman K'na who is torn between true love and service for her people of the North and South tribes. Just as she was falling love with the man who always gives her a string of abaca fibers every morning, both chieftains of the North and South tribes decided to end their war by betrothing K'na the south tribe's only dream weaver daughter and the north tribe's only son Kagis. In the end, even if it was against her will, she decided to marry the man she did not love and sacrificed for her people.

I could watch the movie a thousand times and never get tired of it. The best part of the film screening was the question and answer portion with the artists Ms. Mara Lopez and Mr. RK Bagatsing themselves, along with the production designers. I had learned a lot about the "behind the scenes" of filming the movie and one of the production designers shared that it was not very easy to film specific scenes because most of the time it did not adhere to the normal tradition of the T'boli tribes and they had to do rituals after filming the scene. The language they used was also legitimate, according to the artists, because they really had a language coach and I was amazed at Ms. Mara Lopez because she said that she was able to do adlib in some of her lines in the film.

I also asked them a question about their favorite culture in T'boli during the filming. Mr. RK Bagatsting said that it was the food, specifically the tilapia that they would always eat before the filming because he had discovered a lot of ways on how to cook the fish and would still taste amazing. He also shared that he enjoyed the machine in which the T'boli people make their abaca fibers because it was a tough job trying to operate it. Ms. Mara Lopez on the other hand enjoyed learning about weaving the t'nalak because she said that the T'boli people almost consider it as a religion--that is, they only weave during the night because the abaca fibers easily get broken when there's heat in the morning.

I would never forget my experience with the artists because they shared a lot of things about the T'boli culture and how they admired it the way I do. I have a T'boli friend whom I met in UP Diliman and she has told me about their culture and I was very glad I saw them all in the film.

Indeed the movie K'na the Dreamweaver is simply "bong nawa" (love).