The Tenants

The Tenants (1976)

Sakada

A sakada is a farmer who works in a sugarcane field. The film proceeds to document the stages of sugar production once in the mill, then shifts to the unrest outside where a sakada was shot to death by one of the hacienda's guards.

Date of release
1976-02-20
TMDB
3.0 / 10 (3)
Runtime
1h 58m
Genres
Drama
Director
Behn Cervantes

Casting

Interesting facts

Sakada (The Tenants, also Seasonal Sugarcane Workers) is a 1976 Philippine social-realist film about the ordeals of sugarcane farmers on the island of Negros in the Philippines. It is "a thinly-veiled criticism of the country's feudal power structure." The film was directed by Behn Cervantes and written by Oscar Miranda (story) and Lualhati Bautista (screenplay). Music was done by Lucio San Pedro. It starred Alicia Alonzo, Robert Arevalo, Hilda Koronel, Pancho Magalona, Bembol Roco, Gloria Romero, Rosa Rosal, and Tony Santos Sr.

Production

Sakada was the first film by director Behn Cervantes and scriptwriter Lualhati Bautista. It was filmed under time pressure and budget constraints. As a first-time film director, Cervantes said that he had to deal with technical problems. Time and budget constraints prevented the production from doing reshoots.

Sakada was produced and screened in 1976 while the Philippines was under martial law under Ferdinand Marcos. After Sakada's third week of screening in Philippine cinemas, copies of the film were seized and the director was arrested and detained under the order of Marcos.

After Cervantes' detention, he wrote in a letter to his family dated January 19, 1978, "My movie, Sakada, and my plays, especially the last one, Pagsambang Bayan, show the exploitative nature of this system, the evils the ruling class commit on the many, the need to change the order of things."

Sakada was first shown on television on June 25, 2005, on ABCinema, three decades after prints were seized by the military from movie theaters. ABCinema aimed to feature "only the best local and foreign films that will make the Filipino audience more aware of their culture." In an interview, Cervantes was asked about how young audiences in 2005 could relate to Sakada.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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