“Mas matapang ka kaysa sa inaakala mo,” Elay used to remind her often-bullied son Tonton after narrating his favorite bedtime story every night. He gleefully listens to her soothing voice telling how once a firefly saved his butterfly friend from a monstrous black hound, blinding it with his light. Little did Tonton know that his mother's tale was closer to their tragic lives than he thought. 

Zig Dulay’s film “Firefly” demonstrates that underneath the messages of maternal love and courage, myths can also unveil the harsh realities of traumatic violence and compel one to reclaim their narratives of resistance.

The film follows the story of Tonton in his adulthood recalling his journey as a child with three strangers to Elay’s, his mother, hometown of Ticao Island in Bicol, which he would later find out is the basis for the magical Island of the Fireflies his mother used to tell him about. After his mother succumbed to breast cancer, Tonton made it his mission to fulfill his mother’s dream of returning to Ticao by bringing her ashes back home. 

From the mystical islands to the fictional creatures, the fantastical elements throughout the film invoke the power of Philippine myths, which aim to describe the real world that everyday language fails to capture. 

The boy’s hallucinations of a hound, for one, served as the representation of his abusive father. The traumatic experience Tonton endured made him forget that he struck his father’s head to protect his battered mother. Wanting to remind Tonton of his courage, Elay lived to retell their story through the myth of the Firefly of Ticao. 

Such traumatic memories, as psychiatrist Muriel Salmona expressed, “colonize” a survivor—always looming at the backdrop as a specter that continues to torment in a fragmented way. Like many other women and children subjected to domestic violence, what is forgotten due to traumatic amnesia manages to haunt one in sinister ways. 

The repackaged narrative in the form of the story narrated by Elay articulated the memory her son lost through this myth which allegorized the abuses they went through and Tonton’s eventual resistance. In this way, what was once too harrowing of an experience even to be remembered was transformed into an empowering tale.  

Later on, upon regaining his memories after reaching Ticao, Tonton would grow to immortalize and fictionalize his experiences through the children’s book he authored. By reconstructing his memories and piecing them together for his work, he reclaimed his narratives and exorcized the hound that had long been terrorizing him. 

Empowering oneself and others through the reclamation of these narratives is a noble and necessary undertaking in pursuing justice. The ultimate end, however, must be toward dismantling the systemic causes of the real-life abuses underlying such fictional tales. As the hound of domestic violence persists systemically, the light to ward it off must also be wielded collectively. ●