In the Claws of a Century Wanting is a story about the lives of four families and thousands others like them who came from  the countryside to the port district of Tondo, Manila, trying the city’s promise of better chances. 

Like them, I too, was a newcomer to the city, and during my stay in the area, had easily sensed Tondo’s contradictions. The density of milieu was hard to miss, but could take a while to comprehend. What had been immediately perplexing to me was how the Tondo of our history books had turned into a settlement for the country’s poorest. Tondo, as taught in school, is the birthplace of both the liberation movement and its founding father, who also paved the conditions for the establishment of the Philippine Republic. 

Increasingly moved by this irony, I found myself staying in the community for two years; primarily as a social worker, but also as a wanderer trying to disentangle the ironies of a nation that is now ours but also has always been hardly so. 

In the good years of my youth, I was living, discussing, and solving community problems with mothers, workers, and young people, and day by day arriving at an understanding of the depths of our subjection to multiple layers of colonialism that have far outlived their supposed conclusions. I had almost forgotten my urge to make films.

Soon, pushed by the increasing pressure of global trade, the premier international port surrounding Tondo was signed for privatization, and along with it was a blueprint for the port’s expansion. Thousands were to be displaced in the process. Meanwhile, the traffic of container vans from China, Europe, and the US became busier and busier.

Change of this scale is rarely abrupt or arbitrary. There is a system to it—perhaps the same system that is displayed in the precise movements of every wheel and crane that powers this vast port industry. Hence, while irony and nostalgia are the immediate feelings for me, they are not the only point. The point is a persistent cross-sectioning, even to painful detail, of the aspects of this situation that bears imprints of a colonial past and patterns to a bleak future.

In the Claws of a Century Wanting is a montage of observations that confronts slices of people’s lives with slices of an industrial expansion pushed by global trade. The characters are many but, in effect, only two—the place of industry and the people surrounded and permeated by it. And while the film refers to a momentous reality, its point of view is up close, lingering in the time of waiting, in the lethargy of survival, aware and at the same time oblivious of what awaits. 

How does life go on in the exhaust pipes of globalization? How do people fight for daily subsistence as a historical force more supreme is taking place? If in the beginning I was drawn by Tondo’s past, now I am drawn by its future—and a question of what it represents for me, for us, and for the rest of the so-called  “developing world” in the face of an established order of supremacy that is as certain as it is volatile.

Director’s Interviews

Jewel Maranan on Sa Palad ng Dantaong Kulang and Creativity

Hong Kong Documentary Initiative’s Dialogue with Jewel Maranan, moderated By Ruby Yang

Q&A with Jewel Maranan By DoQ
Moderated by Prof. Patrick Campos