On the Impulse to Write Alexis and Nika
by Laurel Flores Fantauzzo
Maybe the story won’t do to you what it did to me. The two film critics and journalists in love. Alexis Tioseco, 28. The young man of multiple origins who chose the Philippines, his birth country. Nika Bohinc, 29. The young woman writer of Slovenia who chose to join Alexis in the Philippines. Their true home, the place that bound them, was borderless and expansive: cinema.
They met at a film festival, of course. In 2007, Nika was at the helm as the youngest-ever editor of Ekran, Slovenia’s revered film magazine. She opened her small country’s audience to rare global perspectives. Years after her tenure there, a film poster of Raya Martin’s A Short Film About the Indio Nacional / Maicling pelicula nañg ysañg Indio Nacional (2005) remained on Ekran’s wall in Ljubljana, a remnant of Nika’s broad-minded work. Alexis was a prolific critic and writer in the Philippines, a keen champion of its auteurs. He sat on the juries of international festivals, spoke as guest commentator on Philippine television, and taught young film students as a college instructor.
Alexis’ and Nika’s friends and family described the start and continuation of a constant conversation between them. Theirs was a love that was a home. A love that would last, creating and cultivating art and community around the world.
It was a love not without difficulty. There was the negotiation of that impossible distance, the thousands of kilometers between Ljubljana and Metro Manila. There were the differences between them, too: Nika’s penchant for salads and fresh bread and cigarettes, Alexis’ messiness and stubbornness and hatred of vegetables.
And then there was the public love letter that Alexis wrote to Nika, explaining to her his love for Philippine cinema, his origins in Canada, and his dedication to film and the Philippines. And his love for her.
“The first impulse of any good film critic, and to this I think you would agree, must be of love. To be moved enough to want to share their affection for a particular work or to relate their experience so that others may be curious. This is why criticism, teaching, and curating or programming, in an ideal sense, must all go hand in hand.
… My dear Nika,
If there has been a single cause of strain that has stuck out in our relationship, it is this: the idea of my attachment to the Philippines, the strong desire you see that I have to live and work here, and the way that, perhaps, you see this as a matter of misappropriate priorities. 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?”
The letter was a remarkable piece of Philippine cinema writing. And it was an elegant invitation for her to join him in Manila.
Nika’s answer was wordless and more eloquent. She chose to live in the Philippines, for a time, with him.
And then, the horror of the ending. In the country Alexis loved, in 2009, armed intruders murdered the couple at the home they shared. The case, like countless cases in the Philippines, remains unsolved.
I never met the couple, but I always felt I should have. In 2010, I went to the Philippines on a Fulbright scholarship, in search of belonging and connection to my mother’s country. I first heard their names then, and I felt the reverberations of shock and grief and affection that lingered in their circles. I felt I had been denied a friendship, a sense of kinship and family.
Their story repeated in my mind, every time I traversed Metro Manila’s streets, every time I entered a movie theater, every time I sat at a restaurant or a café. I identified with Alexis’ background, with parents from two different countries, and I understood his choice to love the Philippines: a place that often misidentified and frustrated him. I wondered how I might have spoken to Nika about writing, about trying to make a life as an outsider to the archipelago, in its noise and heat and constant motion.
Their story haunted me. I did not first intend to write about them; I thought myself an intruder, an outsider who should stay outside. But the gross injustice of their deaths, contrasted with the vibrancy of their lives, haunted me. They haunted my book, The First Impulse, into being. The book began with my sense of duty: to attempt to restore the couple to their contexts, and to rescue, in text, some of their love story from the brutality that stole them.
So I began years of research. I sought out the films, and people, that Alexis and Nika loved. I steeped myself in Lav Diaz, Raya Martin, John Torres, and Sherad Sanchez. In time, I met each filmmaker in Manila. I visited Ljubljana for three weeks. I watched films in its Kinoteka, understanding more what it meant to be a “front-row person,” closely viewing the texture and grain of film. I had Nika’s editors’ notes translated into English from her tenure at Ekran.
In 2008, Alexis wrote to Nika: “The first impulse is one of love.” He, like Nika, was a frank judge of local cinema and its industry. In the Philippines, open critique can lead to instant ostracization or worse. But he held that their practice, as critics, was guided by love.
The First Impulse was my attempt to uncover the layers of their love story, their dedication to film, and the terrors and complications of violence and injustice in a postcolonial country. I hoped to return Alexis and Nika, in some small way, to the lives they inhabited, and the art they cultivated.
It is an imperfect book—as incomplete, I think, as their own stories are. I remain ambivalent about its imperfections, about what it covered and could not cover.
I wanted, for instance, to name and confront the police officers and officials who botched the initial investigation. But I weighed the contents of the book against the fact of an ongoing investigation. The Tioseco family needed to remain on good terms with officials. In the Philippines, everything, no matter how grave, hinges on good relations. So I withheld the names of officers and leaders responsible for fatal indifference. I hoped that naming their positions alone might still give readers a sense of the banal inhumanity of a postcolonial bureaucracy.
I ache, too, about the imbalance of the book. I had the resources to visit Slovenia only once: three weeks weighed against my many years in the Philippines. I worry I could not do enough to help readers know Nika and her work, the professional struggles she faced in her homeland, and the immersion in Manila, with her partner, that she hoped might heal her. Her community was more protective of her memory, and I was grateful to the colleagues who generously shared what they could. I hope the book does some justice to their testimonies.
I have since received poignant, aching letters from readers encountering Alexis’ and Nika’s story for the first time. They write of their own affection and fear for the Philippines, of the difficulties of long-distance love, of seeking out the films the book describes, of being young and searching for a way to make meaningful art. I’ve received heartening notes from readers who knew Alexis and Nika, too. The book, one interviewee told me, “brought back my friends, if only for a little while.” Alexis’ mother, in a moving note, told me she could not put the book down. His sister Paola told me my portrayal was so accurate, it was as if I knew Alexis and Nika in life.
I have heard less from Slovenian readers. It is a silence I both worry about and understand.
*
September 1, 2019 marks ten years since the cruel end of their lives. Time has moved, but the loss remains endless. One suspect, a collaborator who allowed the murderers into the house, has been caught, tried, and imprisoned. Three murderers still walk free. An epidemic of homicide devastates the Philippines now, supported by too many citizens.
The country’s cinema has grown. Some Philippine “indie” filmmakers have aligned themselves with the funding and ideologies of a violent, repressive regime. Others have dedicated themselves to mournful and angry critique, and to sensitive depictions of life and suffering in this and other eras. I always wonder what Alexis might have written now, where he and Nika might be living now, and what struggles they might have joined on behalf of their humanistic principles.
Sometimes they still visit me in my dreams, years on. In my dreams of Alexis, he is smiling at me, teasing me for how much I worry. In my dreams of Nika, she is smoking, telling me she’s still restless for justice.
I began the book believing that as young writers and thinkers, Alexis and Nika’s love for cinema, and love for each other, still has much to teach us. Their work became a secondary education for me. Prior to knowing their story, cinema, for me, was a diversion, a background respite—at worst, the provenance of elitists. I understood, after watching the films they loved, and reading their essays, how cinema could be a humanistic pursuit: an intimate window to visions, worlds, and methods beyond my own imagining. A calling. A love story. An ongoing, passionate relating.
At a fearful time, may we linger here a decade on, in the years they deserved. Let us continue the collective, connective dreams of cinema. Let us, too, carry on our dreams of love.
Laurel Flores Fantauzzo is currently an Assistant Professor in the English department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. The First Impulse was named a finalist for the Philippine National Book Award. Her debut novel is forthcoming from HarperCollins. She divides her time between Honolulu and Metro Manila.