Fatima Bianchi

A group of blind women talk and tell stories, showing their own way of seeing through sensory memory, singing and dreams: an imaginary landscape bordering darkness and reconstructed through their voices.

In a recording studio, five mothers read the testimonies of other anonymous mothers and open up, laying bare their regret about motherhood. On an imagined island, these five mothers are locked away in an open-air prison. They are under surveillance and forced into hard labor.

In the desert, a man extracts stones from a mountain and breaks them. In his perpetual labour, he meditates upon life and death.

Aswang follows a group of people whose lives have been caught up in these events: a journalist who tries to make a stand against lawlessness, a coroner, a missionary brother who comforts bereaved family members, and a street kid with parents in prison and friends in the cemetery. The film is a shocking account of unprecedented violence and the moral bankruptcy of a regime that still enjoys support from voters.