Binisaya: Archival Power and Vernacular Audiences in Iskalawags

The Binisaya film movement wrests archival power away from the Manila film industry to reconstitute the ongoing history of Cebuano vernacular cinema. Originating as a Visayan-language film festival in 2009, Binisaya now names a community of filmmakers, scholars, artists, and audiences. This chapter analyzes the 2013 film Iskalawags (Scalawags; dir. Keith Deligero) as a nostalgic media archive of a Cebuano boyhood lived under the cultural dominance of Manila and Hollywood; as a satirical trilingual film (in Visayan, Tagalog, and English) that overturns the Philippine hierarchy of languages; and as a valuable record of Binisaya audience-building efforts, forms of making do that endeavor to overcome rarefied film festival circulation through free, informal “guerrilla” screenings in urban areas and rural barrios. The chapter contextualizes Binisaya initiatives alongside the Philippines' three most influential film festivals—Cinemalaya, Cinema One, and Cinema Rehiyon—and previous historical models for the alternative circulation of independent and vernacular films.