Quote:
“Filipinas, farewell! Long live the Republic and may our independence be born in the future!”
Those were Macario Sakay’s last words before he was executed by hanging on September 13, 1907 for treason. His real crime was patriotism, breaking rank with the leaders who sold out the Philippine Revolution to the United States and waging a guerrilla resistance against the American colonial government. They called he and his soldiers “banditos,” a label which has stuck in the minds of many Filipinos generations later (that is, if they even remember his name). His existence in Philippine history negates the official narrative that the Philippine-American war ended in 1902. True patriots continued to invoke his name as a symbol of the unfinished revolution. It would take nearly 90 years after his death before director Raymond Red’s “Sakay” (1993), one of the most accessible and well-crafted bio-pics ever made in the Philippines.Read More »