Guerrillas in the Mist : Movies: A Canadian’s film puts a human face on the Communist insurgency in the Philippines, dividing America’s Filipino community.

It was an unusual audience for a movie’s American premiere. Two-thirds of the opening-night crowd at the Mission District’s Roxie Cinema were Filipinos. There were priests but no celebrities, tables stacked with literature instead of promotional gimmicks and not a paparazzi in sight.

After the film had ended and the house lights had brightened, the audience was asked to convert their applause to something more pragmatic--handing out leaflets hawking the film and filling the donation buckets that circulated through the theater like church collection plates.

“I thought making a guerrilla film was difficult enough,” said Canadian filmmaker Nettie Wild, “but now I’m learning a lot about guerrilla distribution.”

The unusual opening last Friday was for Wild’s feature length documentary “Rustling of Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution”--a film that has stirred division within the American Filipino community because it portrays the left wing opposition to Philippines President Corazon Aquino. Friday’s opening was one more step in the odyssey of a movie that wasfirst shown two years ago in Vancouver and was the Canadian entry in the 1989 Berlin Film Festival’s Forum for Young Filmmakers. The film opens May 24 in Los Angeles at the Monica 4-Plex.

Since the trip to Berlin, the 37-year-old Wild has pushed her film by standing outside a garment factory in Winnipeg leafletting the morning shift of Filipino workers, and has targeted bowling leagues and church socials in other cities where local Filipinos gather.

Now, with her sights on American moviegoers, she is relying on Filipino community groups, political activists and a network of volunteers to ensure that her film is seen in a country that has long had enormous economic and cultural influence on the Philippines.

“This is the most important market for this film, and it’s not just for the numbers and profits,” she said. “It’s the Americans you really want to reach. Even the guerrillas in the film wanted to get their story to the American people, more than the Canadians or Europeans.”

The message--from members of the Communist New People’s Army and the leftist politicians featured in Wild’s film--is that they are not doctrinaire demons solely bent on destroying the government of Aquino, but rebels with human faces who have just grievances and their own internal struggles.

However, it’s the very idea that Wild might be a cinematic courier for the Left that has stirred the controversy around “Rustling Leaves” in the Filipino community. It comes at a time when the New People’s Army has stepped up its lethal campaign against American troops in the Philippines and has been blamed for the deaths of eight Americans in the last 13 months--two last Sunday.

Already, some Filipino-American leaders and organizations have expressed misgivings about the film and its sympathetic portrayal of the New People’s Army.

“The film is communist propaganda,” said Alex A. Esclamado, publisher of the San Francisco-based Philippine News, the nation’s oldest and largest Filipino-American newspaper. “It’s unbalanced, and it’s an unwarranted attack on the Aquino government,”

Others disagree.

As she stepped from the movie house after a matinee performance last Saturday, 71-year-old Sita Garst of Oakland, herself a German immigrant, said she had traveled across the Bay after scanning a list of movie offerings. “I was intrigued by the film,” she said, “and afterwards I found myself very much affected. It was a Philippines I never knew about, a Philippines that I never read about.”

In Los Angeles, where the film has been privately shown to some members of the Filipino community, there already is the same intense reaction from both critics and supporters of “Rustling Leaves.” “I know it’s a controversial film,” said Prosy de la Cruz, a Filipino activist who lives in West Los Angeles. “But this is a film seeking the truth about the Philippines. I felt it was genuine in showing the different voices of Filipinos struggling to make choices.”

The country in Wild’s documentary is a 1987 Philippines--still celebrating Aquino’s year-old “people’s power” revolution yet still mired in poverty, armed struggle and promised reforms that move at a glacial pace.

It is a nation where urban assassins called “Sparrows” carry out their deadly assignments in the heart of Manila and eagerly explain their technique and philosophy to Wild on film--and where police and government troops retaliate with sweeps through city slums.

It is a country where right-wing vigilantes roam the countryside near Davao, protected by local army soldiers and encouraged by a gun-toting disc jockey who demonstrates for Wild how he mixes his top-40 records with on-the-air threats against NPA sympathizers.

It is a time when the founder of the NPA, Bernabe Buscayno, runs for political office.

Finally, in the mist-shrouded mountains of Mindanao, where Wild spent two months moving with the NPA, it remains a lingering state of war where rebel priests celebrate Mass in the woods, teachers lead schoolchildren in songs of revolution and guerrillas alternately pound rice for food and make land mines for the enemy.

Also captured on film is the painful moment when a 19-year-old guerrilla judged guilty of betraying his fellow soldiers faces the realization that he is about to be executed by the friends who had once saved him. “First they let me live,” he says quietly, “and now I will be killed.”

The scene was a difficult one to witness, Wild recalled, but there were other hardships.

A skirmish with government troops left one guerrilla dead and sent the filmmakers fleeing. Each night, Wild and her tiny crew would wrap their cameras, other movie equipment and exposed film in plastic and bury them--so they could be left behind safely in the event of a surprise attack by government soldiers. And when the film stock dwindled, the filmmakers ordered more through a clandestine communications network.

In all, Wild shot 64,000 feet of film during her eight months in the Philippines and survived on funding and other help from Canada’s National Film Board--totaling $161,000--and a $50,000 grant from Channel Four Television in Great Britain.

“I think that it’s amazing she did it, and I’m just delighted she did,” said Peter Katadotis, who was with Canada’s National Film Board when it agreed to help Wild fund the $500,000 film.

Next month, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. will televise “Rustling Leaves” across Canada as the opening documentary in a series displaying independent filmmakers. By then, Wild also hopes to be deep into an American tour that will take her movie to Los Angeles and then onto San Diego, Chicago, Seattle, Portland and a half-dozen other cities.

With the help of the Empowerment Project, a Santa Monica-based media resources center, Wild has booked screens that formed the backbone of theaters that helped show another controversial film, “Coverup: Behind the Iran Contra Affair,” which eventually played in 80 theaters nationwide.