Ramon Obusan loved to shoot moving images, starting with super 8 film cameras. That's how our paths crossed in the past year, when he became the subject of our documentary and my close friend. He often told me that he envied what I did, documenting the crazy cultural quilt that make up our nation. But that's also what he did, for much longer than I. My cameraman Egay Navarro and I would often engage Ramon in camera talk in his open-air dining area, while we heard dancers rehearse the tinikling in the background or a video editor assembling yet another DVD of an esoteric dance from an obscure place. Recently, he told us about helping the film director Chito Rono revive the pastores tradition in Rono's hometown in Samar.

When I last visited him less than two weeks ago, Ramon was worried about the complex production the government asked him to do for the Asean Summit in Cebu, where his famed folkloric group was supposed to perform a dance from each country in East Asia. I recall thinking this might be taxing his fragile heart. I was relieved for him when the Summit was postponed because of a coming storm.

Film historian and director Nick Deocampo had told us about two years ago that Obusan had a vast archive of footage from the 1960s of many Filipino cultural traditions. When I went to introduce myself to Ramon in his dance studio of a house near NAIA, I learned he also had a fascination with little known phallic customs, including a disarming wedding tradition in a remote Laguna town, called the lukayo. We would soon produce a documentary entitled Lukayo for I-Witness, which was also part tribute to Obusan. He had known early on that many of our traditions may eventually exist only in the footage that he was shooting.

What we didn't fully anticipate was the reaction to Lukayo of the government censors sitting on the MTRCB, which found the documentary offensive and suspended our show. They ignored Obusan's earnest pleas at our hearing that there was no malice in this deeply rooted ritual, even if old farming women did wave around wooden penises on camera.

The timing of the suspension was impeccable, because Obusan would be declared National Artist less than a month later. The honor seemed to legitimize the Lukayo and Obusan's argument about culture's rightful place on national TV.

The controversy brought new attention to the artist-scholar and his work. It was another fruitful, colorful year for Ramon Obusan. It turned out that 2006 was also his long goodbye.


Ramon Obusan on the day last June when he was honored as a National Artist in Malacanang. I was there to shoot the event.