Puke ng Ina
Abstract
Galang, D.L.Q. (2019). Puke ng Ina, Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis, University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication.
Dani, a maladjusted prepubescent, suddenly bleeds from her crotch during one unsuspecting night. When her menarche coincides with her father getting fired from work, news of mysterious creatures abducting and killing people in the city, and her mother in pain and bleeding, she takes matters into her own hands. She applies first aid on her mother’s bleeding crotch, and gets transported into her mother’s womb, where she faces the mysterious creatures from the news that she recognizes not just as foreign beasts, but also as figures from her own home.
The film uses Materialist Feminist and Social Surrealist frameworks to negotiate the three-fold hostility women experience in these spaces, both in public and private spaces as we grow up in extremely patriarchal society and in terms of internalized violence and self-repression in the unconscious. Using these frameworks, we also link the material basis of oppression of women, and even of men, rooted in a surreal reality of a state that oppresses and feminizes everyone.