Adjani Arumpac’s Count explores data generated in a milieu of oppression. Set during the Philippine pandemic lockdown (the longest in the world, enforced with strict police rule), it ruminates on the rhythmic formal patterns found in the everyday. Folding in news of the outside world, bearing numbers of the brutal Philippine Drug War and COVID-19 fatalities, it seeks to map how the spectre of a colonial history impinges on the daily contemporary life of a middle-class family. The film begins with Arumpac teaching her sons about counting; as the family is engaged in everyday activities and online learning, the world outside rushes in through TV news clips, sounds, and memories of situations where counting (and accounting) led to loss and suffering.

Arumpac’s lifetime work is an ongoing auto-ethnographical trilogy of full-length documentary films, told through the intimate lens of her family. The first two parts are Walai 2006 and War is a Tender Thing 2013. Additional short documentary projects on Mindanao include Food for Peace 2017; Marawi did not take place 2019; and Project Padian 2019. Arumpac is also a member of RESBAK (Respond and Break the Silence Against the Killings).

Return to Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago: Roots and Currents