Itim

Jun (Tommy Abuel), a Manila-based photojournalist, returns to his hometown of San Ildefonso to craft a photo essay on local Holy Week rites and to look in on his aging father, who is paralyzed from the waist down and unable to speak following a motor accident. As Jun goes about his work, documenting pilgrims clutching rosaries as they approach the altar on their knees, or hooded, shirtless flagellants dragging crosses along country roads, he encounters Teresa (Charo Santos), a beautiful young woman afflicted by bouts of strange behavior ever since learning from a spiritualist that her missing sister, a novice nun, died under sinister circumstances. Jun and Teresa nurture a powerful, peculiar connection, marked by haunting dreams and inexplicable fugue states. Looming over them is the promise of some revelation to be yielded through dialogue with the dead, or the development of a mysterious film negative. Unfolding at a measured pace that befits its air of inevitability, Mike De Leon’s feature directorial debut, Itim, aka The Rites of May (1976), is a gorgeously rendered ghost story brimming with dissolves and strange freeze-frames, cluttered with crumbling religious statuary, steeped in prayers, summonings, and trances, and draped in the torments of colonial inheritance and a poisonous patriarchy.

Before making Itim, De Leon had established Cinema Artists Philippines with Lino Brocka, and acted as cinematographer on its inaugural production, Brocka’s bracing and unforgettable Manila in the Claws of Light (1975). That film’s scriptwriter, Clodualdo del Mundo Jr., would go on to co-author, with Gil Quito, the screenplay for Itim, drawing upon a number of thematic preoccupations found in De Leon’s short film Monologo from earlier that year. When it came time to select a location for Jun’s father’s house, where much of Itim’s action takes place, the director chose to shoot in his own ancestral home, a vast country manor teeming with shadows and slipping slowly into dereliction that, like the verdant landscapes visited by Jun and Teresa, proves immensely evocative of ghostly memories and long-kept secrets. To infuse some verisimilitude into the film’s supernatural premise, De Leon brought on a practicing spiritualist as a consultant, who transcribed her own chants for use in the pivotal séance scenes.

I don’t know that the above litany of facts explains how remarkably fully formed the vision guiding Itim is, but it at least suggests that De Leon, who initially had no ambitions to direct, was exceedingly prepared, and in the years leading up to Itim had fostered a kind of creative family within the blooming Filipino film community. Itim marked the beginning of an astonishing career that’s still finding a broader international audience: the restored version premiered at Cannes in 2022 to awe and acclaim. 🩸