Tralee man Keith Mannix who has recently finished filming a documentary on the small Filipino island of Pangalao detailing the island’s ‘obsession’ with the sport of cock fighting.
A TRALEE man from has recently finished filming a documentary on the small Filipino island of Pangalao detailing the islands ‘obsession’ with the sport of cockfighting.
Keith Mannix from Oakpark, in his 13-minute documentary ‘The Fight’, interviews the local ‘Captain’ Rudy Bundogan to try to understand the complexity of the relationship between a man, and his often only worldly valuable possession, his cock, and how he comes to send it into a ring to fight to a violent death.
TraleeToday.ie got in touch with with Keith yesterday to try to get a sense of how the documentary came about and what were some of the things that he learnt from the experience.
“I was travelling on motorbike on an island in the Philippines and I had my filming equipment with me. I saw this group of people going off in a direction. They were just normal regular Filipinos, I followed them down one or two different streets and eventually I came to this arena where they had all gathered on this Sunday afternoon,” he explained.
“From there, I built the documentary. I went around and did the interviews, it all sort of happened by chance really,” he laughed.
We continued and asked him about what he learnt and gained from the experience of making the film.
“I learnt all about cockfighting. I didn’t know anything before hand. It’s really fascinating because the people, they do understand that it’s cruel and I mean these cocks are their lives. They’re part of their identity. You see this weird duality where you have these men whose pride and joy is their cock, their pet and their animal and what they love, yet they bring them down to this arena and fight them off against each other. It can be cruel and very vicious.”
“It’s a very very strange dynamic, very unusual. That would be the biggest thing that I’ve learnt.”
Keith’s film, though recently released, has been part of several festivals in Ireland, Europe, South America and Asia, and has been well received.
It will be showing at the Dingle International Film Festival, on March 14 at 10.30.
