The documentary Food Delivery by Baby Ruth Villarama takes audiences out to sea, delivering stunning visuals that makes one feel like they’re out there. Out where most of us cannot go. It finally allows Filipinos to see what we might not be able to see with our own eyes, but have felt with so much fervor in our hearts. A face value to the dispute right where it happened.
The 85-minute film is action-packed. It was aided by footage of encounters, skirmishes, and chases between Filipino and Chinese forces—things we only read or see in the news—and not just making do with text or captions. It is refreshing that for a story so difficult to capture, we watched more than we read.
While the visual storytelling was smooth, the story was told somewhat achronologically and without identification of dates. It leaves us to look at where we are at now, after everything and after all this time. The now may lean more towards feelings of loss. News tells us most fishers have been unable to sail to Scarborough Shoal since the June 2024 threat of being jailed in China if caught.
For its sea of visuals, more information and context need to be had. Even the learned would yearn for more. Then one would remember the QR code for more information projected before the film started.
The film leaves the audiences to the task of asking the hard questions or the core issues. Why fishers can’t fish in our own seas? If the fishers are scared, how can the government help them continue to fish? Did the Philippines acquiesce to China’s demand for food delivery coordination or prior information?
Why are we so easily bullied? Despite more than half a century of military cooperation with the US, China’s biggest rival, why are we still so technologically behind and poorly suited to protect our own territory?
There is the part about courage, but there is also the part about desolation, especially in the scene showing state forces radioing our rights but unable to enforce it. Eerily feels somewhat similar to magnifying people’s resilience in the face of disaster. The film then lends us to ask, why the need for the sacrifice of those in the film in the first place?
To answer these questions may deliver the people to greater unity in our fight in the West Philippine Sea.
