Agno: Memories of a Forgotten River

Stranded for 21 years, a shepherdess endures and fights for survival in a foreign land until hope arrives.

Mina, a pretty and intelligent 18-year-old student in a town, falls victim to a viral sex video the circulated in her school. This forced her mother Rita, an overseas Filipino worker in the Middle East, to go on an emergency leave to take care of her only daughter who was severely affected by the incident. In the following days, strange things start to happen to Mina at home and at school. Her nose bleeds endlessly, a python appears in their home, and she sees the spirits of her ancestors come to their house. A healer, an old woman from the next barrio, is called to treat Mina’s strange afflictions. The old woman surmises that Mina’s ancestors had come to tell her of an important message but Mina is stubborn and continues to ignore the signs communicated.

A filmmaker revisits the town of Tayug, Pangasinan in preparation for a new feature film she is making about the folk hero Pedro Calosa and the Tayug Uprising of 1931. As she revisits the actual sites in Tayug where the infamous uprising had taken place, she imagines scenes in her new film about the subject. As she goes deeper in her research at Tayug, she uncovers the memories of the townspeople about Pedro Calosa and the Tayug Uprising of 1931.

Weaving recollections and letters from various migrant workers around the story of a Philippine man searching for his missing wife in a Middle Eastern city. Christopher Gozum creates an intimate, evocative and hypnotic mixture of documentary, poetry and fiction.