Director's Historic War Film to Premiere

While New York may be home to famous movie directors like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, Hoboken has its own resident award-winning filmmaker, John Sayles.

Sayles—who with his wife and producer Maggie Renzi has lived and worked in an uptown Hoboken brownstone for 30 years—has a new movie premiering Friday. Amigo shows a forgotten chapter of American history, when the United States occupied and annexed the colonial Philippines during the Spanish-American War in 1898. The occupation ignited a fierce guerrilla war that lasted until 1913.

The protagonist of Amigo is Rafael, the peaceful headman of a small village on the island of Luzon who is forced to host a garrison of American soldiers while his brother Simon leads a band of jungle dwelling guerrillas against them. Simon wants Rafael to sabotage the Americans. Caught in the crossfire while having to both appease the Americans and consort with his insurgent countrymen, Rafael strives to save his village by being everyone's friend in a conflict rendering that role impossible.

“It's about a guy, like so many people in war, who's stuck between a rock and a hard place,” Sayles said.

Legendary Filipino actor Joel Torres plays Rafael, while Academy Award-winner Chris Cooper stars as Colonel Hardacre, commander of the American garrison. Garret Dillahunt of the HBO western Deadwood and DJ Qualls from the film Hustle & Flow have supporting roles as American soldiers.

Sayles became interested in the Philippine-American War while working on an expansive, multi-setting screenplay about the turn of the 20th century. Recognizing he wouldn't have the budget to make the screenplay into a film, he converted the text into a novel, A Moment in the Sun. It was while writing the novel that Sayles realized he could extract the Philippine scenes into a film.

"We realized," he said, "we had just enough money to make something of a village level."

Sayles shot Amigo on location with a mostly Filipino cast and crew in six weeks, with a budget of $1.5 million.

“It was a nice mix of the energy of the Philippine industry and talent,” Sayles said. “There's so much talent over there. At the same we brought the kind of American style of organization and preparation.”

Sayles said that just as he learned about the Philippine-American war, so did many of his cast and crew members.

“(The history) was hidden because we wrote the history after we won," Sayles said, "and left out the part where a million people died and there was a war."

Many Filipinos died due to the fighting, starvation or disease. Having finally defeated the guerrillas in 1913, the United States continued to occupy the Philippines until 1946 when it recognized the island nation's sovereignty under the Treaty of Manila.

For Sayles, the historic look that Amigo takes also reflects on current geopolitcal events.

“It's not why I made the movie, but it's unavoidable,” he said. “It's a story that could be told about the Nazi occupation of France, or the French occupation of Algeria, or the American occupation of Vietnam, or the occupation today in Afghanistan or Iraq.”

Many of Sayles' films have political undertones, including Matewan, about a coal miner's strike in the 1920's, Lone Star, a murder mystery stoked by ethnic tension in a small Texas town, and Silver City, in which Cooper, a Sayles favorite, earned positive reviews for a playing an inept politician who some critics considered to be a satirical sketch of President George W. Bush. Sayles' screenplay for Lone Star was nominated for an Oscar.

Sayles has written and directed 17 films during his career, from Eight Men Out, which depicts the 1919 Chicago White Sox baseball gambling scandal, to Sunshine Sate, about modern life in a small Florida town, and the Irish folklore tale The Secret of Roan Inish. His films have won numerous festival and independent film awards. Sayles has also directed several music videos for Bruce Springsteen.

Amigo is distributed under Variance Films. It premieres in theaters on Friday, August 19. Hoboken residents can see it at the AMC Empire 25 theater, 234 West 42nd St. in New York City. Sayles will participate in a Q&A session with the audience during the 7:30 showings on the 19th and 20th.