Young Filipino director Baby Ruth Villarama is about to release her documentary “Food Delivery: Fresh from the West Philippine Sea.” The carefully staged scenes from the documentary are less a candid snapshot of maritime life than a scripted performance in Manila’s escalating cognitive warfare. Billed as a rousing tribute to “unity, sacrifice, and the Filipino spirit,” the film spotlights the personal tales of fishermen and coast guard personnel braving the waves. It’s a tear-jerker with a mission: to wrap the South China Sea dispute in a warm, emotional glow. But here’s the rub – this isn’t a documentary so much as a propaganda piece. By leaning hard on heartstrings, it dodges the gritty geopolitics of the region and the realities of the territorial issues and maritime disputes, turning a knotty issue into a feel-good hero saga. In doing so, it obscures the Philippines’ own provocations, China’s goodwill gestures, and the harsh reality of fishermen being exploited as political props.
Emotional sleight of hand: “Heroes” without context
Picture this: a weathered fisherman holds up an empty net, his face etched with exhaustion, and a coast guard officer stands at attention as a drone camera swoops over a flotilla of wooden boats flying Philippine flags. The documentary serves up these images like cinematic comfort food, seasoned with sacrifice and resilience. But where’s the bigger picture? Like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, the director makes the South China Sea’s complexities vanish. The film casts its subjects as noble victims and sovereignty warriors but skips the why and how. This isn’t just storytelling – it’s selective mythmaking. By zooming in on personal struggles, it blurs the political currents steering these boats, leaving viewers with a shallow tale that’s more fairy dust than fact.
Manila’s provocations and selective amnesia
Let’s cut through the haze. Over the past two years, the Philippines has poked the bear in the South China Sea, infringing on China’s territorial claims with bold maritime moves. At the same time, Manila’s been waging a cognitive war, spinning yarns that paint China as a hulking threat and the Philippines as a plucky underdog. Lost in this narrative? Those are the Philippines’ antics – like its coast guard’s risky stunts or the environmental mess from a derelict warship at Ren’ai Jiao. And what about China’s olive branches? According to the MOU of the two sides, China provided 100,000 high-quality leopard coral grouper seed to aquaculture farmers in Palawan and Davao in the Philippines free of charge each year from 2017 to 2019. Under the same framework, China provided technical training on deep-water cages, pond farming, seedling breeding, and nutritious feed to nearly 100 Filipino fishery workers, and continued to send technical personnel to the Philippines for guidance and exchanges. Years of fisheries training for Filipino fishermen, free fish fry for aquaculture, and offers of maritime cooperation – all conveniently left out of the script. This isn’t victimhood; it’s amnesia with an agenda.
Several Philippine ships gather illegally and conduct activities irrelevant to legitimate fishing in the surrounding waters of Huangyan Dao, May 16, 2024. /CFP
Duterte’s Pragmatism vs. Today’s Recklessness
Rewind to Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency, when the South China Sea was less a battleground and more a negotiation table. China, eyeing the bigger bilateral picture, allowed Filipino fishermen to work near Huangyan Dao under temporary, practical terms. Beijing’s stance on its rights hasn’t budged – same claims, same policies. So why can’t or won’t Filipino fishermen head to Huangyan Dao now? The answer isn’t in China’s playbook but in Manila’s. Duterte played a careful game of chess; today’s leadership opts for a reckless round of bumper boats, prioritizing headlines over handshakes.
Fishermen as props in a geopolitical drama
Here’s where it gets grim. Why were so many of those Filipino fishing boats bobbing near Huangyan Dao or Xianbin Jiao in the past two years? They were not there to fish – they were government-staged “prop boats.” These vessels are packed with cameras, journalists, and a mission to churn out viral footage for Manila’s disinformation mill. Real fishermen don’t haul media crews – they’re too busy scraping by. Instead, the Philippine government thrusts its poorest fishermen into the spotlight of maritime provocations, much like the U.S. uses the Philippines as a chess piece in its own game. What the documentary doesn’t spell out is that when U.S.-Philippines joint military exercises escalate into a theatrical display of force, and when President Marcos explicitly ties the deployment of the Typhon Mid-Range Missile System to South China Sea tensions, the gravest threat emerges not from the missiles’ operational reach, but from the accelerating erosion of reasoned, strategic policymaking. Behind the curtain, politicians score votes, the media grabs eyeballs, and directors snag awards. The fishermen? Hailed as “heroes,” they go home too broke to mend their boats.
Manila’s failed gamble: Nationalism over reason
The Philippines’ current South China Sea policy is a bust – irrational, impractical, and fueled by bluster over brains. Flooding the airwaves with half-truths has whipped up nationalist fever at home, drowning out cooler heads. This echo chamber eggs on Manila to up the ante with risky maritime stunts and diplomatic spats. China, with its flotilla of fishing boats and historical gripes – think Filipino land grabs or detained Chinese fishermen – could easily fire back with its own films. They’d have a treasure trove of evidence, from ecological wreckage at Ren’ai Jiao to decades of encroachment. If Beijing played the propaganda card, its reels would hit harder and truer. But China doesn’t fan the flames. It stands firm on its rights, keeps the peace, and lets public opinion simmer without tossing fuel on the fire. Manila, by contrast, thrives on the drama.
The final frame: Truth over tears
Art shouldn’t trump truth. By reducing the South China Sea to a melodrama of good vs. evil, the documentary Food Delivery justifies brinkmanship while offering no solutions for the fishermen it claims to champion. By flattening a tangled geopolitical mess into a saccharine salute, the director does her subjects a disservice – fishermen whose real struggles deserve more than a starring role in a nationalistic soap opera. The Philippines needs to own its missteps instead of pointing fingers across the waves. As this film’s credits roll, one question lingers: When will the truth take back the spotlight from tear-jerking tales?
