Critique paper:

“The Body Collector” – a documentary by Cesar Apolinario

The documentary “Body Collector” is about the series of events happening mainly in Manila, where
Tatay Orly works in a funeral service. Because of the war against drugs, Tatay Orly finds himself in night
operations all night long. Usually the victims will be the drug users with some packets of illegal drugs
within their body. Even though Tatay Orly has collected a lot of bodies for the funeral service, there
should be an increase within his income, although the opposite happened because some of the bodies
were never claimed and were just stuck inside the funeral service’s morgue. On the other hand, Nanay
Herminia is a mother who is longing to find her missing son, Eric. Nanay Herminia is desperate to find
her son wherein she approached Tatay Orly’s funeral service to check if she can find her son there. She
was also asking the help of an “albularyo” saying that she believes the healer rather than the police
because the healer says her son is alive.

The critical points in the documentary is that there is really an increase in the death rate because of the
Oplan Tokhang and instead of looking at it as a good source of income for Tatay Orly’s business, it isn’t.
Since there are a lot of bodies that were never claimed so they were just inside the morgue.

Meanwhile on Nanay Herminia’s side, she has been desperate to find her son so she was holding onto
what the healer would say even though there is no solid reassurance that her son is actually still alive
just by predicting. Although we cannot blame her if she just wants to find her son and be reunited with
him.

Through time, we see both the positive and negative effects of this war against drugs. Sure they may be
a number of drug users and drug dealers that went down since the start of these operations but there
are also negative effects as there may be innocent people that may be involved because they may be
framed, or scammed.