SUBIC FREEPORT—“Who are the people closest to nature?” This was the prompt given to the creators of “Ha’antu Ka Maku? (Where are you going?)” when tasked with creating a short documentary.
For Emiliana Quinto, one of the film’s producers, only one thought came to mind: the Indigenous community of the Aeta (Aytá/Agtá) people. The Filipino German kindergarten teacher lives near the trail that the Ayta Ambala traverse when they forage for food in the rainforest of Subic.
The rainforest breathed in slow, heavy rhythms in that humid, heaving mid-morning in last year’s summer. The shriek of a hornbill pierced the air, its red beak flashing across the sky. A cloud rat, now critically endangered, appeared to scurry out of sight.
Who can quantify the mountains of Zambales’ beauty but the Aeta people speaking their language? But when a language is dying, like what the Ambala tribe is trying to prevent, stories and names are lost, and species are never described in the same way.
Yet who knows what the Ambala, a slipping group of nearly 2,000, call their home? All we can wonder about was the film’s title, “Ha’antu Ka Maku? (Where are you going?).” Where can we track down the traces of both a fading land and a disappearing language?
The film features Caca Manding from the remote village of Pastolan, teaching the young generation to embrace the Ambala language for the sake of the next. Being the culture bearer for a disappearing sanctuary and a people being assimilated, the man brings the forest’s beat closer to his own people.
It is through art, music and dance that the Aeta of Zambales’ highlands breathe life amid the tangles of biodiversity, and it is the culture bearers’ traditional tasks of teaching and songwriting that could prolong the people’s heartbeat in an environment constantly under threat.
Growing silence
Quinto has stood at the edge of this living archive, watching the treeline like someone reading an old friend’s journal, or a diary that can be deciphered with a shared tradition and a beloved experience.
“I’ve seen this place change,” she tells CoverStory, her voice caught between awe and worry. “When I first came here, wildlife was everywhere. Now…the silence is growing.”
Quinto, by training, is a preschool teacher. By choice, she is a conservation advocate. And in 2023, to tell Caca Manding’s story, she became a filmmaker, to recite the disappearing names that define Ambala: her environment, her love, her people.
Led by Quinto’s artistic skill, “Ha’antu Ka Maku?” was created through an international 12-week collaboration among the Philippines, Vietnam and Japan, aimed at presenting the Ambala’s poached land to the global perspective.
Begging the Ambala question on the next step ahead, the green-studded documentary is both a refreshing look into unseen nature and a quiet act of resistance. It is with great pushback that the Ambala view their homeland beyond a disposable commodity, molding their ancestral continuity to nature.
‘Like a midwife’
The ReSync program that birthed “Ha’antu Ka Maku?” had one radical condition: no traditional filmmaking formulas. Instead of polished scripts and rigid shooting schedules, participants were given workshops with anthropologists, documentarists, and cultural workers.
Before viewers go on the journey, the film allows them to listen, to ask internally, as though production has become a meditative eulogy for an unseen narrative. “I’m not here to impose a story,” Quinto says. “I’m more like a midwife. You just help bring someone’s story into the world. It belongs to them.”
And she is an aid-giver trying to resuscitate a language struggling to survive the smoke and mirrors of a polluted world.
“Because the youth are a lot different than the elders. They knew their roots in the language. And this is another thing about language. It actually ties you to the land in a very special way,” Quinto says, adding:
“The Aeta were managing the land as they grew along. So these languages that are, that we’re losing—we’re losing libraries of knowledge that are tied to this land.”
Choosing the Ayta as her subject was not a safe decision for Quinto. Friends told her it would be complicated, politically loaded. But for her, conservation without indigenous leadership is incomplete: “These are ancestral lands,” she declares. “You can’t separate the environment from the people who’ve cared for it for generations.”
Indeed, for the Ambala, being faced with the unknown engages not only fear but also survival. The film displays survival as a way of Ambala life, a common journey among the Philippines’ Indigenous peoples (IPs) who live in the last frontiers beyond urbanization.
As the forest slowly disappears, the questioning title is a clear path to ask Quinto’s subjects, her audience, and herself to consider direction, purpose, and belonging.
Ecological and linguistic pandemics
After the film was completed, Quinto fell ill with Covid-19 just days before its Manila premiere. “That hurt,” she admits. “The whole 12 weeks, you’re imagining that final moment, sitting in the dark, watching it with everyone else.”
Later she learned that the program’s organizers had chosen to screen “Ha’antu Ka Maku?” as the last film. The act might have been deemed a sidelining, but in the filmmaker’s lens, it was actually a mark of esteem. “I’d like to think it meant they valued it,” she says.
Encouraged by a friend, Quinto began applying for grants and festival slots, learning the language of funding proposals from scratch. The film was even considered for the Sundance Festival in the United States before receiving what she calls “the nicest rejection I’ve ever had.”
“When they asked that question, I thought, oh, the Aeta,” she says. “But I hadn’t been with the Aeta for many, many years. Matter of fact, when I was talking to my best friend and my husband, I told them, ‘This is my idea.’ They both said, ‘No, don’t do an Aeta.’ I was like, but they do tie us to the systems. This is their ancestral domain.”
Yet, for Quinto, storytelling, like the Ambala narrative, is always an organic journey and a project never meant to be commercialized. It got to the point where potential funders asked her to produce a formal script for future projects, and she vehemently denied that it was a franchise for pity.
“This wasn’t made to sell. It wasn’t fiction. It was someone’s real life. You can’t reverse-engineer that,” she says.
Through her work as CEO of Conservation Solutions, Quinto has been developing ways for the Aeta community to run their own ecotourism and conservation programs. Indeed, beyond what corporate social responsibility promotes to be led by themselves for conscience and tasks, she believes that IPs should take the lead, simply because they know better as the best arbiters of the land.
For conservation activities, birdwatching trails, guided forest walks, cultural exchanges, she believes that IPs like the Ambala should set both terms and benefits. “When the community runs it, the money stays in the community,” she says. “We just help with promotion, logistics, and making sure they’re supported.”
She draws comparisons to her time in Sagada, Mountain Province, where Igorot communities are fiercely protective of their land rights. “If the Aeta had that level of legal knowledge, we’d be paying them rent to be here. This is all under their title,” she says.
More than linguistic beauty
Quinto says in a later text message: “To my ear, Ambala has a beautiful, soft and rhythmic quality. Perhaps because I grew up around Zambal/Zambali through my family from Botolan, there is something familiar and deeply comforting about the sound of Ambala to me.”
Zambales is not just pure linguistic beauty; it is also part of a key biodiversity area: multiple ecosystems stacked in a triple-tier rainforest, from the canopy to the understory and even to the forest floor.
“You know, they know what plants you can use for certain things, elements,” Quinto says. “I have this friend who used to manage an adventure magazine for the Philippines…It was based here.”
She recounts trivia, like how kids recover 700 species of lizards, endemic mammals, towering hardwoods, and then shifts into the intimacy of anecdotes of forest life.
“It looked like a dragon,” she says, chuckling, about a monitor lizard on the roof. “Rodney (her husband)! There’s a dragon on the awning!”
She’s been chased onto car rooftops by wild boars protecting their young, startled by snakes sliding across roads like living speed bumps, and charmed by cloud rats that picked the locks on their own cages.
“These are things you lose when the forest goes,” she says. “And it’s going.”
She wishes more students from the University of the Philippines and other research institutions would study here. “This is one of the richest ecosystems in the country, but it’s understudied, underfunded, and increasingly under threat,” she says.
“Ang gubat. Ang bundok. Yun ang pinakamahalaga sa buhay ng mga katutubo. Dito kami nabubuhay,” she adds of the forests and mountains so important to the lives of IPs, highlighting how nature nurtures and protects even the community researchers that accompany her.
Quinto credits her preschool teaching for shaping her perspective: “When you work with kids, you learn to slow down. To pay attention and to name things. That’s what I bring to filmmaking—patience, curiosity, and respect.”
More than a year later, Quinto has yet to make another film, but more seek her narrative. Life has taken other shapes. “Some people think I made money off this. I didn’t,” she says. “From the start, I’ve been clear: If it earns anything, it goes back to the community.”
Her dreams now are less about red carpets and more about rootedness: training Indigenous youth in media skills, archiving oral histories online, creating ecotourism that strengthens rather than extracts from the land—something that allows people to speak their language, live their tongue, and tell their story.
In the end, Emiliana Quinto is never defined by any single title. She is, depending on the day, a teacher, a conservationist, a filmmaker, a community worker and a bridge between conservation science and indigenous knowledge, between formal institutions and grassroots leadership, between the stories told and the ones still waiting to be shared.
“The land remembers,” she says, eyes on the shadowed green of the forest. “And if we listen closely, so can we.” CS
Hannah L. Tabunda is a journalism graduate of the University of the Philippines Diliman and a contributor to CoverStory. Her interests include feature writing, multimedia journalism, and “stories that explore people, culture, and lived experiences.” She also engages in such combat sports as karate, Muay Thai and boxing, and has taken up bouldering and top-rope climbing.
Jeremy Ballesteros is a BA Journalism graduate of UP Diliman.
