The First Impulse

"The First Impulse is a most remarkable convergence of biography, true crime, reportage, social commentary, and personal memoir. Laurel Fantauzzo chronicles the lives of Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc with deep love and respect, and the circumstances surrounding their deaths with none of the lurid sensationalism that taints most crime reporting in the Philippines. At the same time, she seamlessly explores the questions of belonging, identity, family, and homeland."

— F.H. Batacan (Smaller and Smaller Circles)

"In The First Impulse, Laurel Fantauzzo lays bare a complex and compelling tangle of personal narratives: hers and those of her subjects, the murdered cinephiles Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc. Here, class, ethnicity, and contemporary Philippine realities intersect in unsettling ways. A haunting, unfussy elegy of young lives as much as it is a whodunit, Filipino-American Fantauzzo’s work will cause you to ponder and appreciate the interrogatory restlessness and intelligence of those whose belonging is simultaneously claimed and disavowed by multiple worlds."

— Luis H. Francia (A History of the Philippines)

"The First Impulse offers a compassionate and unwavering look at the complex social dynamics of the Philippines, from the privileged scions of the wealthy who have the luxury and leisure to become filmmakers, authors, and critics, to the underclass, who cannot afford the price of the ticket but yearn for it all the same. While our sympathies are clearly with the young murdered couple at the heart of this story, there’s something here that speaks to larger tragedies of history and social inequality, making the circle of victimhood as large as the archipelago itself."

— Robin Hemley (Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday)

This is a rewarding story that extends far beyond the Philippines, to questions of identity, class, and family. I wish Fantauzzo could work her magic with every news story she comes across, and the world is a better place because she chose this one.

— Kerry Howley (Thrown)

This is a true, moving story of star-crossed lovers, but that’s just the window into the dysfunctional world that Fantauzzo deftly dissects. The saga of the young film critics Alexis and Nika becomes absorbing ruminations on cross-cultural relations, the power of cinema, and personal motivations, including the mysterious attraction that drew both Alexis and the author back to the exasperating homeland of their migrant families.

— Howie Severino, GMA News

THE FIRST IMPULSE

Copyright to this digital edition © 2017 by

Laurel Fantauzzo

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written approval from the copyright owners.

Published and exclusively distributed by

ANVIL PUBLISHING, INC.

7th Floor Quad Alpha Centrum

125 Pioneer Street, Mandaluyong City

1550 Philippines

Phones: 477-4752, 477-4755 to 57

Fax: 747-1622

Website: www.anvilpublishing.com

ISBN 9786214201440 (e-book)

Book design by Carina Santos

E-book formatting by Arvyn Cerezo

Photographs here and here by Christian Yambing

Photograph here courtesy of Chris Tioseco

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a work of nonfiction. No scenes or individuals are invented.

For moments I did not personally witness, I reconstructed action and dialogue as it was related to me through many interviews and documents. Any errors that may remain are my own.

As of this writing in 2016, the criminal case remains unresolved. To respect the perilous progression toward justice, I have omitted some names from these pages.

FROM CTV.CA

Thu. Sep. 3 2009

10:10 AM ET

. . . Four suspects are wanted in the slaying of a Filipino-Canadian and his Slovenian girlfriend, both film critics, who were shot dead in the home they shared in suburban Manila. . . .

. . . Alexis Tioseco, 28, and his 29-year-old girlfriend, Nika Bohinc, were killed late Tuesday, in what police believe was a botched robbery at their home in Quezon City. . . .

. . . It is believed that the robbery was an inside job, involving a maid who worked for the couple. Tioseco and Bohinc showed up after the robbery began and were shot. . . .

. . . Tioseco and Bohinc met at a film festival in the Netherlands about two years ago. . . .

—I write subjectively, which, despite the striving to capture the totality and penetrate into the depth, holds for everything that human beings create—

—Nika Bohinc, Focus, Ekran, 2008

The first impulse of any good film critic, and to this I think you would agree, must be of love.

—Alexis Tioseco, The Letter I Would Love to Read to You in Person, Rogue, 2008

Contents

THE LETTER

PERSONAL MOTIVATIONS

TRYING TO BUILD

ZERO DEGREES OF SEPARATION

DEBTS

WHAT WOULD THIS SCENE COST?

THE MEETING

WHAT HAPPENED

SHADOWS PROJECTED THROUGH CELLULOID

THE STUDENT

MANANG

DEMOLITION

THE SUSPECT

FILIPINO FILM LANGUAGE

CORRUPTION OF CULTURE

BETWEEN LJUBLJANA AND METRO MANILA

INDICATING A STRUGGLE

WITH INTERRUPTIONS FROM BATANG WEST SIDE

UNRESOLVED

QUESTION FOR THE INVESTIGATORS

SAVING BATANG WEST SIDE

FEBRUARY 2016

ANSWER

THE LAST DAYS

NIKA, 2008

ALEXIS, 2008

SEPTEMBER 1, 2009

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE LETTER

Two years after they die together in the Philippines, I hear a theory about Alexis and Nika. A Filipina psychic sighs about them. Oh, this couple. Theirs is a very old connection.

Many eras before ours, the psychic claims, Alexis and Nika had agreed to meet and love each other during their lives, and into their next lives, and during every consecutive life after that. Even after their murders in 2009, Alexis and Nika had already agreed, in some spiritual territory beyond death, to meet yet again in the future.

I don’t know what to make of the psychic’s claim. It asks too much of me. It asks me to believe in psychics. It asks me to believe in reincarnation. It asks me to believe in the existence of souls. It asks me to believe there is a kind of love that can transcend and endure beyond even the cruelty of murder.

Their friends say there was nothing mystical at all about Alexis’s and Nika’s first meeting in Rotterdam. It was 2007, at a film festival, where enthusiasts and creators share affinities and fierce opinions about the young, ever-evolving medium: cinema. It’s only natural that crushes might develop between such cinema lovers in dark theaters, late nights at restaurants and bars, walks in foreign cities.

In January 2007, in the lobby of a Rotterdam hotel, Alexis sees Nika. Nika sees Alexis. Soon, they are both laughing.

—

With every new love, there is the sense of an arrival. But there is also a sense of departure. Every new love is its own kind of migration. You glimpse a new territory, your future in a new home, and you cannot help but compare the space before you with everything opening up in the space after you.

Say you are twenty-six, and your name is Nika Bohinc. After seeing Alexis, you whisper to your friends in Slovenian about his face, his tall stature, and you laugh. Maybe, if you are Nika, you inevitably think of the scene in your favorite film, Jules et Jim. The Francois Truffaut movie you love so much, you can’t remember the number of times you have seen it, and you’re planning to make your own film essay in homage to it. Maybe you think of the scene where Jim speaks to Catherine, the passionate, high-cheekboned, French New Wave character your friends say you resemble. I love the nape of your neck, Jim tells her. It’s the part of you I can look at without being seen.

Maybe, if you’re Nika, you’ve noticed that Alexis has already taken a photo of the back of your own neck, as you walked ahead of him toward the next movie screening in the chilly Rotterdam daylight. Soon, you sense, you will take your own photos of the young man watching you now. You will photograph his profile reflected in a dark hotel room’s mirror, as he looks at a festival program and wonders which movie to see with you next.

Say you are twenty-five, and your name is Alexis Tioseco. You have a full-blown, smiling serenity that inspires acquaintances to nickname you Buddha. Your favorite movie, the movie that echoes through your own internal, emotional truths, is not terribly famous, and it is not a love story—at least, not on its surface. Batang West Side is about the unsolved murder of a Filipino boy in New Jersey. If the characters long for anything, it is for the Philippines, as they live the perils of separation and migration from the country they love, in spite of its terrible wounds. The Philippines, the country you have chosen with your whole heart, is where you expected to make your love and your home. You had first planned to love a Filipina woman.

You were not expecting a Slovenian woman. You did not expect Nika Bohinc, who edits the film journal Ekran, which once published an essay of yours about Lav Diaz, the director of Batang West Side.

Everyone who watches the two of you observes a happiness that is its own new language.

—

The day Alexis meets Nika, he sends photos to his brother in Vancouver and his best friend in Manila. The title of the email is simple. The object of my affection : )

In one photo, Nika leans toward Alexis on one elbow at the first table they share between them. Her eyes are directed at him, as if they’ve already scripted every sweetness and challenge between them. Alexis leans across the table on his elbow, too, but he looks at the camera directly, as if pleased by some knowledge he and Nika already share.

They look as if they know what will happen. How they will laugh more together. How Nika will introduce him to her parents in Slovenia, and they will walk the edge of Lake Bled. How Alexis will fix every broken object at his home in Quezon City, at 39 Times Street, so that when Nika visits him, she will be comfortable in the house he inherited from his father. They will intertwine their fingers when they pose for a photo outside a restaurant in Manila on September 1, 2009.

In 2007, after meeting Nika in Rotterdam, Alexis returns to Manila. From now on, Nika’s absence will be its own presence in his life. He will think of Nika in Slovenia, a country whose landscape is as beautiful and precise as she is. In his own gated home, in a wealthy neighborhood in Quezon City, a short walk away from a soon-to-be-demolished slum, Alexis will fill with restlessness, write long emails, and wonder about getting a treadmill.

In Ljubljana, working in a drafty office converted from an old soldiers’ barracks, Nika will type editors’ notes, meet with her disparaging bosses, and ask her friends all the while: How do you know? How do you know if someone is the one for you? How do you recognize the one? Everyone she asks will sense the answer already embedded in her question. Nika already knows. Alexis is the one. The tension in her chest, so tangible, at times, it seems like a fist—that part of her has already relaxed into an open hand, with Alexis’s presence in her life.

But there is the distance. The ten thousand kilometers between Ljubljana and Manila.

To bridge it, they Skype. They text. They write to each other. They tell each other what troubles them. They argue and end arguments together. They read to each other.

Alexis likes to read Nika one essay in particular: Confessions of a Space Boy, by his friend and editor, Erwin Romulo. Erwin wrote it for his own wife, and Alexis quotes it to to Nika again and again: he had already found a home. He didn’t have to think hard for her name.

—

Slovenians like to say that theirs is the only country in the world with the word love built into its name. But perhaps the landscape of the Philippines most accurately resembles the reality of love—a forever fragmented, hazardous archipelago. There will always be some weather that makes love difficult, some inevitable, natural break in the landscape between you, and you will have to make a difficult choice.

Because when Alexis and Nika can no longer bear it—the brief visits, the Skype credits, the cell phone minutes, the weeklong film festivals that end too soon—Alexis says he cannot leave the Philippines. He knows he may be asking too much of Nika. It is no small thing to ask that someone share an affinity for his chosen homeland: a country that, in its crimes and its hardships, demands an empathy you are sometimes unsure you can summon. But perhaps that is the inexplicable nature of real love. You summon it at the very moment you’re sure you can’t.

If everyone who can help the Philippines leaves, Alexis says, often, to anyone who questions his choice, what’s going to happen?

—

One day in 2008, Erwin Romulo gives Alexis an essay assignment. Erwin is editing an issue of a magazine that will discuss origins, and he is asking writers to reflect on the elements that shaped them into who they are. Alexis is a film critic, earning an international stature as the most influential critic in Philippine cinema. He is doing this work away from his mother and brothers and sisters in Canada, away from his beloved in Slovenia. Why? Why choose to remain in this country?

Alexis protests. No, he says to Erwin. No, no, no, no. Why write about himself? There are so many films to cover, so much else to say about other filmmakers, other Filipinos.

Alexis, Erwin urges him. You’re gonna write about how you became a film critic. It has to be documented.

It is a Saturday. Erwin gives Alexis until Tuesday.

It is the Philippines’ rainy season. Downpours frequently thunder against Alexis’s galvanized iron roof. It frightened Nika when she first visited him in Manila, but he has reassured her of the intense weather’s normalcy here.

He thinks about his assignment from Erwin. He stays up too late. He gazes at his computer. He hesitates and hesitates. He waits until the last possible moment, as he always does when he has a deadline.

—

Pause here, as Alexis begins. Choose not to see his act, now, as what it was later mourned to be: the precursor to a tragedy, the beginning of a horrifying ending.

Look at Alexis at this singular moment—up too late, surrounded by festival postcards and movie posters, staring at his electronic screen, feeling both his hesitance and his certainty. His has never been solely a love for film. It has been a love, too, for the Philippines, the home he has chosen. And now he has a third love—unexpected but inextricable, now, from everything else he hopes for.

His act at this moment is simple. In June 2008, fourteen months before they will die together in the house where he is thinking, and longing, for her, Alexis begins a letter to Nika.

My Dear Nika,

I’ve been asked to write a column for this issue of Rogue Magazine, and the topic given to me was myself.

I’ve always felt it awkward to write in public spaces about personal motivations behind the work I choose to do, so I have decided to use you as an excuse: there are things that you must know, that you may sense but not understand unless I tell you, and so I shall use this opportunity to put them on paper.

Besides, how could I say no to this offer when just the other day you recalled how an essay that was written by the solicitor of this column played a central role in our being together? One must pay back one’s debts . . .

I know sometimes you may think that it was the fact that we worked in the same field that attracted me to you, but I must tell you that this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Why? Because one of the greatest joys I believe one can feel is to share that which they find beautiful with someone who otherwise wouldn’t have noticed it, and to see it appreciated. This is the main reason why I love teaching. It is also the evidence that cinema isn’t what brings us nearer to each other: because in this regard, we are on equal footing, and I must instead find other things in me to share with you. For anyone who knows me, they know how difficult that is . . .

Does a place mean more than a person? Does my work in the Philippines mean more than the possibility of a life with you, somewhere, anywhere else?

But Rogue wants to hear about cinema! Or at least about my work and what I have done in it. Why it means so much to me, and why I have done the things that I have. So it is about cinema that I must write!

Some of this may seem like things you have heard, my dear Nika, but don’t worry, if I am successful it will all come together in the end, and you will see why it relates to you, to us, and to the future.

PERSONAL MOTIVATIONS

I flew to the Philippines from the United States in 2010, my life unmoored. I was twenty-six, alone, and unemployed. I intended to spend two months in the capital region, Metro Manila, before beginning graduate school in the United States. I had the vague hope that something waited for me in the city where my mother had been born, something that would anchor me.

I had been to Manila twice before. I was the only one of my mother’s three children she forced to return with her in 1997, when I was twelve, and I was the only one of my siblings who returned of my own accord, in 2007, to attempt a learning program in Filipino, the language I never learned while growing up in California.

By 2010, my third visit, I had gotten used to the script of questions for me whenever I would arrive. Ma’am, a stranger would inevitably ask, where are you from? Lumaki ako sa California, pero Pilipina ang nanay ko. I grew up in California, I would answer, my Filipino as proficient as a two-year-old child’s. But my mother is Filipina. Ah, so you are staying with your mother, the questioner would reply in English. Hindi, may bagong asawa siya. Nakatira siya sa States. No, I would still try, in Filipino: she has a new husband and lives in Canada. Your father? Italian American, I will answer, and people will invariably grin and hum at this strange, unlikely combination. Hmmmm, Filipina Italian! And the line of questioning will be over. I will have been categorized as a mostly-foreigner, and the stranger observing me will be satisfied with my categorization.

My answer to the question—Where are you from? What are you?—always strategically avoids saying directly what I am, or what my origins are. To Filipinos raised in the Philippines, I am a white Filipina American—Fil-Am, in local shorthand. But Filipinos usually put emphasis on the -Am part of me: mostly white. Whiteness, foreignness, is still associated with power and wealth in the Philippines, a country that spent much of its history under violent white control.

To Americans in the US, I am ethnically ambiguous. I have been categorized as Sephardic Jewish, Armenian, Latina, or simply a tanned white person with wild dark hair. Mine is its own odd, lonely, funny plight. I grew up in California, always longing, in some amorphous way, for the Philippines, my mother’s country, a country whose citizens don’t recognize and accept me as someone who belongs there.

When I arrived at Ninoy Aquino Airport in 2010 and stepped outside into the night, I felt an immediate, visceral sense of recognition. Here was the heat, so quick and intense it felt like its own atmospheric embrace. Here was the smell: diesel fumes, stagnant water, sweat. It is not a bad smell. It is musty, aged, familial, layered. Here where the loud whistles of guards overdressed in navy blue pants and long-sleeved white shirts, bored, underpaid, bearing sawed-off shotguns. Here were porters in thin, short-sleeved shirts and frayed black pants, beckoning to me, expecting a larger tip from someone pale and English speaking.

A Filipina friend picked me up and drove me to a room I rented. Along the way I saw the new malls and casinos, the billboards advertising American fast food, the skeletal ascendance of new scaffolding for parking garages. I saw the Filipinos living out of makeshift, wooden wagons, under tattered, multicolored umbrellas. Vendors sold fermented duck eggs and fried meats by candlelight. Strangers wearing tattered tank tops and ancient sandals walked between cars paused in traffic. My friend reminded me to lock my car door. I looked foreign, so I might be especially targeted for petty theft or kidnappings.

I arrived at the room I rented in Quezon City, the most populated city of the country, home to nearly three million people. I tried to sleep to the coughs of diesel engines and the cries of neighbors’ roosters. I fell ill immediately. The summer I’d planned—steeping myself in my mother’s country, practicing the Filipino language, seeing what I might see—was truncated into time at home with the air conditioner. I hid from the heat and could not accept any food. I lost ten pounds in two weeks. I grew even paler.

My landlady took pity on me and invited me north with her, to Baguio, a region with pine trees and milder temperatures. During the Commonwealth Period, when the US ruled the Philippines as its first colony, American military officers had constructed Baguio into a vacation spot to recover, as my landlady thought I should, from the tropical heat of Manila.

We stopped by a café in the evening. My landlady wanted to introduce me to a friend who might have volunteer opportunities to me. I met, for the first time, Gang Badoy. She was a radio host, a youth organizer, and an overall energetic leader, writer, music enthusiast, and educator; all of her work in service to the progress of the Philippines. Gang wore her hair in a trendy bob, smoked as often as she smiled, and checked her full calendar with her young assistant every other minute. I was exhausted, but I forced myself to stay awake and listen to Gang as she told me about her work and her life.

It seemed like Gang never slept. Among her projects, she had a regular, four-hour radio show each week, RockEd Radio. On it, she interviewed politicians, victims of human rights abuses, musicians, artists, filmmakers, and film critics. RockEd was an eclectic classroom on Filipino civic life. She ran a nonprofit with the same name that motivated students to organize fundraisers for a dizzying number of causes. She led HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns in gay bars. She wrote editorials for newspapers. She tweeted and facebooked several times an hour about whatever scandal or rumor shouted from the Philippine media that day. She taught a regular writing class at the most notorious maximum security prison in the Philippines, the New Bilibid Prison.

But she hadn’t been to prison for a while, about eight months or so. This long absence, I would learn later, was because of Alexis and Nika, two names I did not yet know.

—

I told Gang about the places I’d written for in the past, leaving out the fact that all of them had fired me, blaming budget cuts after the 2008 US financial crisis.

I’m here to find stories, I told Gang. So I can be a somewhat interesting Fil-Am during graduate school in the States, I added, hoping to make her laugh.

Gang did laugh. She was forty but looked twenty-five—aging well, as I noticed my mother and aunts are, too. She seemed to laugh more loudly than any laughing Filipina in the restaurant, despite her stressful life. She seemed adaptable in the way I wanted to be, filled with an always-ready energy. Gang lit another cigarette and gestured toward me. Something about her voice made me want to follow her into a more enthusiastic, awake way of living.

I was not prepared for what she said next. But the Philippines, a place I wanted to know better, is a country in constant motion. So I agreed with Gang, because I felt I should be in motion too.

Gang stamped her cigarette under her leather sandal. It’s settled. You’re coming to jail.

—

By jail, Gang was referring to the New Bilibid