Tahimik’s sole fiction feature to date, the sly Turumba presents itself as a charming example of neo-realist storytelling, complete with a voiceover narration by a sweet young boy in a tiny Philippine village. When the papier-mâché animals manufactured by one of the local families for an annual festival are discovered by a buyer from Germany, their fortune is made, until demand starts to swell and what was once an artisanal pleasure has become alienated labor. Thus does Turumba metamorphose into a razor-sharp and pitch black allegory of modernization and neo-colonialism. Children are a constant presence in Tahimik’s work, and here he uses the guileless point of view of the film’s young narrator to provide ironic commentary on the pursuit of economic development.

For thirty years, Tahimik has been working on a film about Enrique of Malacca, the Malayan slave owned by Magellan who may have been the first person to circumnavigate the globe. In its current state, it reveals Tahimik working in a different register – the historical epic – nevertheless imbuing it with his trademark humor and imagination. Even as a fragment, the film fascinates.