Insurrecto

Two women, a Filipina translator and an American filmmaker, go on a road trip in Duterte’s Philippines, collaborating and clashing in the writing of a film script about a massacre during the Philippine-American War. Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation American soldiers created “a howling wilderness” of the surrounding countryside. Magsalin reads Chiara’s film script and writes her own version. Insurrecto contains within its dramatic action two rival scripts from the filmmaker and the translator—one about a white photographer, the other about a Filipino schoolteacher.

Within the spiralling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto are stories of women – artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters – finding their way to their own truths and histories.

About the Author

Gina Apostol won the 2013 PEN Open Book Award for Gun Dealers’ Daughter, as well as winning the Philippine National Book Award for her novels Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and others.

Librarian’s Comments

An inventive, complex novel about a forgotten moment in the U.S./Philippine history. Free Library of Philadelphia, USA