Kano is about all the women we’ve failed

This story about an American war veteran who holds women captive in a way that’s different if not farthest from the literal, is an example of how documentaries must be done – should be done – in the face of the ones that we generally celebrate in this country. Which is to say that in Kano: An American and His Harem, Monster Jimenez and Arkeofilms prove that the way to a documentary are words, the ones spoken not by a narrator but by the people who live these stories. In the hands of the more creative among us, real life is always stranger than fiction. Here, it was also more stunning: astounding in its resonance, its lack of romance, its realness. I could only be awed, watching Kano in a packed theater, its local premier happening within the 12th Cinemanila International Film Festival 2010, and fresh from the docu winning the First Appearance Award at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam. Everything here was unexpected. Though I knew it was a docu, I didn’t think it to be about a man such as Victor Pearson aka Kano. That the second part of the title has generally been dropped saved me from imagining the harem – and really, who even imagines harems to exist in this country?

For movies like this, I thank the heavens that I don’t Google anything before I see it. Of course this is a hit-and-miss affair, but at least when I am surprised in a good way, it reminds me of my capacity at being astonished by what is special. And this is what Kano can only be, special and important in the context of contemporary indie filmmaking in general, and indie docu filmmaking in particular, at least in the way it is produced in this country. There is much daring here that didn’t give me the sinking feeling that the work just wants to pander to foreign film critics’ taste. Instead, Kano’s daring is about the story it wants to tell: there can only be bravery in the decision to talk about what’s considered as the dark secrets and dregs of society and allow it an amount of brightness. But too, it can only be brave to look convicted rapist Pearson in the eye, and not quite give him the chance to deny guilt. Instead Pearson is forced to deal with queries, ones that he can’t ignore because he knows them to be intelligent. His eyes, despite the cataracts, are bright in their acknowledgement of – sometimes surprise in – the truth(s) in these questions. Then he seems to recover and throws questions about sex and abuse right back at the camera. You’re a woman, you should know, he says. What morality? he asks. He lights a cigarette, is distracted by the women who come to visit him. The women sit around him, but barely talk to him, speaking and laughing among themselves, taking the money that’s handed to them by Kano. Jimenez’s camera in the middle of that jail’s visiting area functions as walls that actually talk, highlighting the fact that in the outside world, there are no walls. The women speak animatedly and at length about their individual stories with Kano. The older ones talk about the past with nostalgia, as if to say that those were good times, those were the good times. The younger ones talk about the present; some of them testified against Pearson and recanted, and married him in Islamic rites. All of them talk about living together in the community of women that’s been created around Kano’s money. Because this is made clear here: Kano’s harem is possible because he gets his pension as a war veteran from the US. It is clear: Kano came to Manila to find a wife, and says he got more than he bargained for, maybe we all did. His conversion to Islam has meant being able to keep multiple wives, other than the ones whom he has regular sexual relations with, all of them becoming part of the community he continues to keep alive from jail. All he asks in return is love and care he says, but also a lot of sex. Pearson aka Kano is a convicted sex offender. Let that be clear. Meanwhile, what’s also clear here is that the easiest way to document this story is to sensationalize it. This would usually mean making the mistake of romanticizing it by showing teary-eyed women, difficult jail conditions, the beautiful landscapes of both provincial Philippines and suburban America, all of it to gather anger against perpetrator, against the women who don’t believe Kano guilty of rape, and who ultimately don’t believe that last girl who has yet to recant her rape testimony. The more creative way is Jimenez’s way. Begin by seeing that Kano, while subject of this story, is not all of it; in fact, he might even be secondary. To prove this, one has to listen well to these women’s voices. Make sure to let them speak as comfortably as they can in the language that they know. Let them laugh at the absurdity of their stories. Let them take pride in Kano’s name tattooed on their breasts. Let them be themselves as they tell you why they are in this story, given Kano, given all the other women here. Show how these women have very particular stories, because they cut across at least two generations, because they all speak of Kano as if he is savior but also brother and father and lover. This decision to listen to as many voices as possible and to distribute it across the narrative is one thing; to know restraint and control is another. This balance Jimenez creatively traverses in Kano, refusing to sensationalize images of tenderness and tattoos, stories of sex and bodies. While the women’s words are strung together, there is no redundancy. One will speak of sex, the other of brotherly love; one will talk about servitude in relation to Kano, another will speak of what seems like an equal relationship with him; one will point a finger at who loves the man less, another will say all these women are stupid while I am not. Most of them will say that they know the real Kano; all of them will declare love. There is much laughter. This is the tragedy that’s slowly revealed in this movie. It is the tragedy of Pearson’s appearance years ago in a tiny provincial town in Negros Occidental, impoverished as the women here were, feudal as the ideologies remain. It is the tragedy of the women, and our failure to educate them, from one generation to the next, so that they may know of the oppressions that are clear here, over and above the money that they acquire. The tragedy here is ours, and I could only feel it in my own inability to easily wrap my head around Kano’s story, to dismiss it as one thing or another. I could not dismiss this movie, not as anything. I felt anger, yes, at least when I thought of Pearson and his abuse of women. But faced with these women’s laughter and seriousness, some of their tears and a lot of their declaration(s) of (the need for) love, I could only feel compassion. I could only point a finger at myself, and wonder what I could’ve done to save these women from a man like Pearson. Here is the creativity of Kano: it is able to invoke laughter without laughing at people, it allows these women to create their world with words without making it all about just one thing, because there are many things here. The least of which would be my anger. And here is where the creativity in Kano becomes crucial to its reception: this is not just a bunch of interviews strung together in chronological order, this had no re-enactments, no romanticization of such real conditions. Kano proves that creativity is intertwined with the vision of telling a story that’s pre-judged, and creating a narrative of it that allows the judged to speak, and places the camera at a distance. But too, Kano proves the story of one man, who has lived away from the center that is Manila, is also the story of the countless nameless Filipino women he’s had sex with, those he has raped. Kano proves that the story of the convicted rapist need not be about reimagining him as innocent, or insisting on his guilt: it can be about the story of the man, Victor Pearce, and the women who have left and stayed, those who have choices and those who don’t, those who seem to treat this as entanglement and others who see it as freedom. It’s the story of the one girl whose testimony has kept Pearce in jail. It’s the story of us, as audience, who can only be challenged by a narrative such as this one because it is rare on our shores, because it is able to balance what we imagine to be acceptable and not, the silenced and the noisy, the unsaid and articulated. Of course we’d rather not talk about a man like Kano. But only the unfeeling and uncaring wouldn’t see that this docu is actually about the women we’ve marginalized, the ones we fail to listen to, ultimately the ones we’ve failed. It would seem only just, only correct, to sit through Kano and more than getting angry at the gall of this man Pearce, get even by listening to these women’s words. Listen with compassion, hear them out the way you would your sisters. Because that’s what they ultimately are, and that is what must resonate after you see Kano. Because in Jimenez’s creative hands the balance between justice and storytelling, tragedy and humor, compassion and creativity, is as beautiful as it gets. – GMANews.TV