Alexis Tioseco & Nika Bohinc: Babang Luksa

Remember, remember, the first of September. Exactly one year ago on this day, two lives, young, in love, still in the middle of making a difference, were snuffed out, taken away abruptly, without warning, leaving a scar in the worldspace they were meant to occupy. Alexis Tioseco, film critic and founder and editor-in-chief of Criticine, an online journal devoted to the intelligent discussion of Southeast Asian cinema, and his girlfriend Nika Bohinc, also an established film journalist, were gunned down in Tioseco’s house. He was 28. She was 30. A year later, that scar is still open, ragged, raw, unhealing. And if his friends and family have anything to say, it will stay that way until justice has been served. You see, just like the majority of crimes, of murder cases in the Philippines, nothing has happened, the bureaucracy moving like oil on seawater, coating everything it touches until it drowns, is forgotten. Gunpowder, murder and plot Since the case made the news when it happened, and since the people involved were authorities in their fields and not quite Filipino (Tioseco was Fil-Canadian, Bohinc was Slovenian), the police seemed eager to cooperate. A botched robbery, they said. An inside job, accomplices of Criselda Dayag, a maid Tioseco had hired a month before. Criselda had let the men in. The men had tied and blindfolded Manang, Tioseco’s older helper, and lain in wait for Tioseco himself. Later, they shifted the blame onto Danilo Jomoc, an employee of Tioseco’s family business, a man who had known Alexis since childhood, a man whose son Alexis was helping send to school. Jomoc was thrown in jail and ironically, it was Alexis’ friends and family who rallied to get him out. The police were incensed, upset that the case could not be closed so easily. “Aren’t you happy that someone is in jail?” they implied. Not if it’s the wrong guy. I see no reason why murder should be forgotten This year, on what would have been his 29th birthday, Alexis’ friends and family staged a screening of select films curated by Alexis himself for a festival. I remember asking his brother Chris how the case was progressing. His response was hopeful, even optimistic, amounting to “We’ll have them soon.” It has been seven months since that screening. Nothing has happened. Alexis and Nika’s murders remain unsolved. Tonight at 8pm, friends and family will once again gather at the Tioseco home at 39 Times St., Quezon City at 8pm. A candle and prayer ceremony will be held, and according to RockEd’s Gang Badoy’s Twitter feed, the Tioseco family will give a statement to mark the first year after the murders. Afterwards, a film screening of Mike de Leon’s Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising will be projected against the gate. The event is open to the public. Called Babang Luksa, it is the Tagalog term for when a group of people gather together to make the end of the time of mourning for a loved one, usually held either 49 days or a year after a death. Just because the mourning has officially stopped, however, does not mean that everything is fine, that people can forget this ever happened. A year gone by without results isn’t going to make people move on. It’s going to make them angry. And at this point, anger is what we need. Because the guilty have to know that they haven’t been forgotten. And like Chris Tioseco said on his brother’s birthday seven months ago, “We’ll have them soon.”