Call Her Ganda

"Call Her Ganda" lays out the facts for us: On October 11. 2014, a Filipino trans woman named Jennifer Laude was murdered in a hotel room. Security footage showed that she had arrived there with another woman and a 19-year-old U.S. Naval PFC named Joseph Scott Pemberton. When Pemberton left the room, he was alone; he sauntered out of the hotel, leaving the door to the room partially open, and disappeared into the night. The other woman, growing concerned, entered the hotel room and found Jennifer dead - sprawled in the bathroom, with her head in the toilet.

This was to be the beginning of what grew into an international dispute between the Philippines and the United States, with the United States clearly having the upper hand. An agreement between the two powers known as the VFA - "Visiting Forces Agreement" - essentially says that the U.S. will take into custody any military personnel charged with a crime in the Philippines. If any criminal trial is not concluded within one year, the charges will be nullified and the accused American servicemember allowed to return home.

That, of course, is only one of a multi-armed monster of intersecting injustices. The broader, deeper issue is one of gender violence - in particular, the murderous rage unleashed by cis males against trans females. As Buzzfeed writer - and trans journalist - Meredith Talusan covers the story, this PJ Raval-directed documentary interviews Meredith's family and friends, situates the killing in the context of the Philippines' colonial past, explores the traditional pre-colonial role of trans women in Filipino culture, and follows each wrinkle as events unfold. Media smears target Jennifer's family; right-wing trolls post ugly sentiments (including personal attacks against Talusan); a mysterious American who comes to be known as "Georgetown" tries to get Jennifer's mother to sign a document in English that would pay the family off for them to drop the case.

In the background, international politics rumble. Jennifer's murder and the American response comes to symbolize more than a century of colonial oppression. When the profane and vulgar populist Rodrigo Duterte won the presidency less than a year before the victory of fellow authoritarian Donald J. Trump, it was partially on a message of making the Philippines sovereign again. Needless to say, once Trump took the Oval Office, the two became bosom buddies - Duterte's ruthless gangland-style murders of more than 7,000 of his own countrymen, supposedly for drug-related offenses, notwithstanding.

At the heart of the case, though - and of the movie - is the story, and the mystery, of a Filipina whose fateful meeting with an American serviceman took place mere days after she secured paperwork to travel abroad with her fiancee, a German man, and to marry him in his home country. Meantime, the accused - Pemberton - was an ordinary gay from New Bedford, Massachusetts, with no discernible reason to hold animus against the LGBTQ community - a community to which his own sister belonged. What do we blame, and who do we hold accountable? Meredith travels to New Bedford at one point, hoping for hints about where Pemberton's rage, if that's what it was, might have originated. At his high school? In the community at large? Stopping a local man to hear his thoughts on the case, Meredith finds her query answered with a mix of ignorance and casual bigotry: "She was a she-male? He killed her? I mean, he killed him?" Meredith's shoulders seem to slump, and we're right there with her.

Jennifer was her family's primary breadwinner and the leader of her circle of friends. Was she also a sex worker? Once the spiritual leaders of their culture, Filipina trans women are now relegated to such "niche" industries as a matter of survival, we are told, and they face discrimination at every turn. The case brings light to their existence and offers them a chance to speak out, but it also - or so we hear - brings heightened discrimination against them. Meantime, while the media smears Jennifer's family with allegedly false reports that they are demanding a payout in cash and U.S. documents (further inflaming the right-wing trolls who assumed all along that the family was primarily interested in such gains), the locals end up taking the view that the family are being "selfish" for not resolving the matter quickly, since the incident and the press attention it receives leads the U.S. Navy to restrict sailors while in port and pinches off the flow of American money.

As the U.S. maneuvers and Jennifer's family press for justice, no easy answers emerge... only questions that deserve careful, serious and dignified consideration.