When Marilou Diaz-Abaya was proclaimed National Artist for Film and Broadcast Arts last June 10, 2022, she had long deserved it having lived art and life with consummate artistry.

Her works from Brutal to Karnal from Jose Rizal to Muro-Ami up to Sa Pusod ng Dagat and Milagros speak for themselves.

Indeed, she was into film not to make money but to refract art and life into her personal looking lens.

As it is, Sa Pusod Ng Dagat, Muro-Ami and Jose Rizal made up for an excellent trilogy of Abaya’s output.

Moreover, Abaya’s Milagros was indeed existential and it showed that Abaya was one of the original indie filmmakers whose mainstream films don’t always conform to the tired-and-tested commercial formula.

Sa Pusod Ng Dagat was Abaya’s tribute to the sea and it was amazing how the film flowed spontaneously like the life cycle in the rural areas. The inhabitants were virtual captives of the island they considered home. To most, this was where they were going to live and die.

It was refreshing to see the village comadrona taken over by a young man (Joemari Yllana) who narrated his idyllic beginning in this village by the sea and ending with a shot of him trailed by children whose birth he had facilitated and witnessed.

Muro-Ami – like Sa Pusod ng Dagat –was another tale by the sea. Viewed many times with reruns on television, it remained a quiet but symbolic exploration of the deep, blue sea, its latent power, its bottomless mystery and how its cycle relates to human life as it were.

In the last few years of her life, Abaya remained a consummate artist.

She found time to write her last book, The Moonlit SEAsons. It is one book recommended for film lovers who want to go deep into the art and life of Abaya.

Published in 2009 some three years before her death. Moonlit SEAsons was the filmmaker’s foray into literature as well as her last diary when she was diagnosed with cancer in 2007.

In the 187-page book designed by Dani Mojica, Abaya shared with her readers her fascination with nature and the world beyond Planet Earth.

Specifically, she dwelt on her admiration for Japanese art and culture and her obsession with the moon and the sea and how her future film projects were dictated by this fascination. It led to her writing very personal essays and to dabble in poetry notably in the genre of haiku, tanka and poem- tales.

She admitted poetry evoked intuitive experience impossible to film.

Understandably, she paid tribute to the sea in the opening haikus thus:

 

a coral garden

deep inside my mother’ womb

In the dark, spawning

 

white tops on blue bay

windsurfers in pas de deux

Oh sweet amihan

 

choirs of angelfish

Beethoven’s Ninth symphony

diver’s cathedral

 

A curious essay on her friends –Ishmael Bernal and Rolando Tinio — called Two Navels was a clue that the filmmaker was all set to join her friends some three years before her death (the book was written in 2009).

She recalled that Bernal and Tinio also loved the outdoor in unusual ways. Rolando couldn’t swim but loved the sea. Ishmael was a trained diver but preferred to climb Rocky Mountains. “They have gone ahead beyond the visible horizons of this earth, leaving me behind with souvenirs of their Life as Art.”

When Tinio passed away and she was mourning his death, Abaya wondered if her own (death) would be as blessed and peaceful.

Thus her poem went thus:

 

farewells by the sea

now in far horizon

moon sets agony

siren lowered to her grave

lungs filled with salty water

 

She rued then that Tinio and Bernal were watching her earthly life and they would wait for her. True enough, she joined Bernal and Tinio when she passed away October 8, 2012.

The book revealed a lot about the friends she kept and the teachers she revered and the poetess and intimate essayist she wanted to be.

On the whole, the book ended with her fascination with sea even as she recounted the countless chemotherapy sessions, she had to go through for five years.

‘Moonlit SEAsons’, like Abaya’s films, was an exquisite reflection of her art and life.

Two years before her death, Abaya admitted she was already fascinated by Mozart’s Requiem which some people always associate with funerals.

Interviewed for an All Soul’s Day story, she confided: “Mozart’s Requiem, as do all his sacred music, always pulls me away from earth and transports me to a heavenly experience. In that part called the Introitus, I associate the few notes played on a bassoon (accompanied by the string section and followed by the rest of the winds) as Mozart himself mourning his own death even before he actually expires. There is a subsequent build up with the brasses; and then the chorale storms heaven with an urgent plea, joining in the glorious Communion of Saints who begs for Mozart and for all his fellow mortals: Requiem aeternam dona ets, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ets.  (Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine on them.) The Requiem does not at all sound like a funeral march. Rather, it is, at least for me, a fervent prayer for eternal life.”

The film director noted that the story behind the Mozart’s Requiem was as unearthly as the music itself. “A stranger commissions Mozart to write a Requiem. Mozart composes it even as he himself falls ill and prepares to die.”

Her favorite opera was no doubt Verdi’s La Traviata which was also a favorite of one of her best friends, National Artist for Film Ishmael Bernal. “In that opera, lovers are reunited in death. For Violetta and Alfredo, Gran Dio! morir si giovane — “O, God! to die so young” is not a cry of despair, nor is it the end.”

Abaya’s last film was “Ikaw Ang Pag-ibig” which was adjudged best film in the Catholic Mass Media Annual Awards.

In between shooting films and attending film festivals, Abaya would find time for a concert especially when her best friend, pianist Cecile Licad, was in town.

“Her performances always leave me in tears,” Abaya once said. “In her, you get not just her music but a view of life as we live it. Few artists can do that to her audience.”

“How terribly sad,” Licad reacted when she learned of Abaya’s death in 2012. “I will always remember the happy times and the inspiration she has given me. I will reconnect with her every time I play Chopin’s funeral sonata.”

Understandably, Abaya’s love for music translated well in most of her films.

In the end, Abaya’s art and life were summed up in the film documentary entitled “The Accidental Filmmaker: A Tribute to Marilou Diaz-Abaya” directed and produced by Mona Lisa Yuchengco

Some memorable interviews in the documentary had her saying that an artist’s life is not about trophies, awards and achievements. Being an artist is not about money, she pointed out, although she perfectly understood the producer’s agenda. “Being an artist is also about confronting art and life and their uncertainties.”

Her parting words in the documentary: “It is easy to let go of all earthly concerns when you remain basically a child of God.”

 

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