During my schooldays in France, I went island hopping in Greece and then spent a week in Turkey. At the Istanbul Atatürk Airport, for a flight back to Athens where I was to spend a few days before returning to Paris, I realized at check-in that since I had used my one-entry visa to Greece on the first half of my vacation, my visa was now invalid. I was stuck in Istanbul. Though I could have bought a plane ticket to Paris, I really wanted to see Athens. I was also trying my hardest to be economical. Young and confused (I was 21), I took a bus to the Blue Mosque to think of what to do. Minarets and domes layered like colossal steppingstones to the sky lent a meditative mien, and due to the bustle of people in the square and its surrounding restaurants, I didn’t feel alone. I decided to enter Greece by way of train, assuming that the borderline customs would be less stringent. At the railway station that night, I phoned a guy who had befriended me at the mosque days earlier and had acted as my tour guide – a courtesy call to tell him that I was still in town. As Aydin wasn’t home to pick up, I left a message with the person who did. Lo and behold, in less than an hour, Aydin showed up, unexpectedly, giving me plenty of information to my questions about borderline protocol and the duration of the journey. It would have been a 32-hour ride, plus without any certainty that I would have been allowed admittance. Now I was really stuck in Istanbul. But Aydin’s hospitality, as well as his account of having survived losing his passport and briefcase in Germany and Belgium, assured me that everything would be okay, a testimony to the saving grace of friendship.

Friendship is a theme celebrated in many movies, a couple of favorites being “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) and “Beaches” (1988). The one that ranks high on my list, however, is not famous: “Happy Times” (2000). The film resonates with my experience in Turkey because it is about a blind girl, Wu Ying (Dong Jie), whom her stepmother (Dong Lifan) casts aside and who, as a result, gains the sympathy of the woman’s suitor, a factory worker named Zhao (Zhao Benshan). Zhao elaborates tales of wealth to impress the stepmother and her stepdaughter, claiming to be the owner of a hotel that he calls Happy Times. In reality, the hotel is a ramshackle bus that he charges young couples to avail of as a love nest. Zhao has also spruced up a warehouse space, where he sets up Wu Ying as a masseuse to the fictitious Happy Times Hotel so that she could have a source of income, while he coerces his co-workers to be her clients. Everything he does for the blind girl is at first an act of pity. Then it turns into acts of kindness and finally of friendship. I am not blind, but stranded in a place foreign to me such as Istanbul without a soul to rely on, Aydin’s fortuitous friendship opened my eyes to the benevolence inherent in all of us.

For the six days I was there, Aydin had introduced me to his girlfriend, whom he called “my darling.” (He referred to a male friend as a “boyfriend.”) She was a young woman with a toothy smile, swarthy complexion, and hair dark and luxuriant as a bouquet of violas. Aydin was fair with a crew cut and an aquiline profile – features belonging to the European lineage of the Turks. The two of them together exemplified the culture’s racial amalgamation. Being the only Asian tourist in sight, I had expected coldness from the Turks. Quite the opposite. On a bus or at the Grand Bazaar, people would smile and pose for my camera. Some locals even provided their addresses for me to send their pictures to. Aydin himself said, “This not liking each other between Greeks and the Turks, it’s ridiculous. We are all people.” Hostility still persists over a history of wars between the two nationals that dates back to the Ottoman Empire. Not everyone is pleased with it, though. In the spirit of goodwill, Aydin’s darling cut me slices of melon as Aydin served as translator for the conversation between she and me. They lived in an apartment furnished with a rolled up carpet and a view of soot darkened buildings. Sunlight through windows brightened the walls and the floor.

Stranded, I was able to contact via pay phone my father in Manila. His instructions were for me to get the next available flight to Paris at whatever cost, courtesy of the credit card he had given me. So long to Athens. It wasn’t meant to be. By then, I was tired anyway, hungry for my daily fix of almond croissant. Aydin helped me find a hotel for the night even though I told him that I’d be comfortable sleeping on his and his darling’s apartment floor. He said their place wouldn’t be appropriate for me, not because I wouldn’t be welcomed but because he had neither a sofa nor a bed to spare. I didn’t care. The sun, the geniality of my hosts, their companionship… when you’re alone, friendship is a priceless gem. Still, Aydin wouldn’t hear of it. The hotel I stayed in was something out of the “Twilight Zone” – a hallway floor that undulated and rubble in the shower from a collapsed wall. An explosive seemed to have detonated in the bathroom. And there was no other guest.

Aydin accompanied me to the airport in the morning to procure a ticket, after which we returned to his apartment since I wasn’t to leave until the next day. He introduced me to the building manager and the man’s family, and this led to more food. (Just as in the Philippines, when you are invited into somebody’s home in Turkey, you are offered a meal.) The building manager was Oliver Hardy hefty and mirthful. He had a four-year-old son as nimble as a squirrel. When I took out my camera, the boy shrieked and climbed up his father’s leg as if it were a tree. He must have thought the camera was a bomb. Oh, his tears… how they wouldn’t stop. The boy in his arms, the building manager would playfully say “boo” while covering his son’s eyes with one hand and then releasing it in order to show that the world was still in one piece.

In “Happy Times,” Wu Ying tells Zhao that because she is blind, she would like to see him by running her finger tips on his face. “I’m not easy on the eyes,” Zhao says. “Can I touch you?” Wu Ying asks nonetheless. And together they delight in his short hair, thick eyebrows, and eye bags, which she calls “suitcases.” Kindness is beauty. I myself have photographs that stand as proof. And we’ve all got the movies. The bond that develops between Zhao and Wu Ying is one of those blessings we each pray or wish for. He gives her enough love, too much of it, and happiness besides, and on account of that love and happiness, she gains the faith in humanity to guide her through life’s darkest hours.

This is what gives us resilience, the comfort of a fellow human. Friendship is never far despite the oceans that separate us. “The world is too small,” Aydin said on my last day in Istanbul. He, his darling, and I were walking across the Atatürk Bridge. It was a heavenly promenade. Clouds ballooned above us. The railing reflected the silver sheen of the sky. “We shall meet again,” he said. We haven’t, and it is doubtful we ever will. A friend of mine who himself had gone backpacking while in college said it perfectly: “You meet people you will never see again, but you never forget them.” I believe the sentiment also holds true for Aydin and his darling with regards to this lost tourist, for all of us who have been lucky to experience the solicitude of a passing friendship born in a moment of need.

Through earthquakes and hurricanes, through war and peace, we wish these strangers who have bestowed upon us their trust all the best. We wouldn’t have made it without them.

A mother has a way of finding her lost child. The nuns in “Philomena” (2013) live by the conviction of premarital sex as sinful so that girls who engage in it are damned and unfit for parenthood. Birth must occur without a doctor. The pain endured in the process is the girl’s penance, after which the child is given up for adoption, whether or not the mother consents. This is how a young Philomena (Sophie Kennedy Clark) is separated from her son. Her father sent her to a convent laundry in Ireland, a rehabilitation center in the 1950s for so-called wayward girls; she had gotten pregnant by a boy who had seduced her at a fair. In the four years that Philomena is there, working as payment for her bed and food, she has visitation rights to her boy. Then one day, he is gone. For the next 50 years, she would periodically return to the convent for information on his whereabouts, only to be told none exists. An older Philomena (Judi Dench) ultimately finds an ally in Martin Sixsmith (Steven Coogan), a reporter who is covering the story of her quest.

Through her journey, Philomena wrangles between hope and defeat, faith and disillusionment, anger and forgiveness. An atheist, Martin serves as her moral adversary, questioning her unwavering belief in God despite the nuns’ mistreatment of her. For all her devoutness, Philomena is not myopic. In a scene where she peruses a scrapbook that contains pictures of Michael and his partner, Martin is edgy; he doesn’t think she is able to grasp that Michael was gay. She does, instantly and without dismay. She says she had known when her son was a little boy, and having worked as a nurse, she reveals herself to be informed of the Republican government’s negligence of the AIDS crisis in America during the early days of the epidemic.

Mothers are surprising in that way. They are aware of much more than we kids give them credit for. My own mother is no exception. Like Philomena, my mother can be stoic about what she keeps to herself. I discovered this of her when I was 15, on the morning that she lay awake in bed as I entered my parents’ room to kiss them both a good day before I left for school. My father was asleep and snoring, so she was alone in her thoughts. The movie “Making Love” (1982), which I had rented the day before, was in the betamax machine, and the title bothered her; it was too adult. “What’s the movie about?” she asked. “It’s about a married man who has an affair with another man,” I said. My mother jolted as if to jump out of bed. “It’s a good movie,” I said. I may as well have come out. It would not have been a shock. As a child, my favorite color was pink; I played with my sister’s Barbie; I would reenact the story of Snow White (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1920s-1950s/snow-white-and-the-seven-dwarfs-someday-my-prince-will-come/); and I parodied mannequin poses. Instead, my mother lay pensive. I was at the age where if she were to pry into my thoughts and feelings, it would have been intrusive, even frightening. I had secrets from her now. So we parted in silence.

Months later, I joined a religious retreat that entailed a weekend of prayers, barbecue, and friends. Since it was my first spiritual experience as a burgeoning adult, my parents considered it a milestone. A letter from my mother awaited me upon my return home. It was the first love letter I ever got, and will forever be the only one of its kind. In it she writes on behalf of herself and my father about their dedication to my brother, sister, and me:

When time comes, you’ll find out that the most or one of the most difficult things to do is the profession of one’s love – in my case, much doubly so since most of the time, I can’t seem to express my true feelings in words. Most of the time, I presume on a lot of things, just as I presume that through our actions (Daddy and I), you’ve felt how we care and desire for you and Kuya and Ate the best in life… Sometimes, you tend to disagree and I do the same, but that is just normal, as long as you keep your respect for us just as we will not falter in our outpouring of love. Please keep in mind, too, that we would help you in all your problems, big or small. Never feel ashamed to confide in us, for as later in life, you’ll find out that the family is your only truest friend… Do pray that our family would continue to be this close and happy, full of love and respect for one another. Pray that God gives you all the luck and happiness and the success you crave, which are all the things I pray for every night. Seek, too, for God’s guidance so that with your prayers and mine, what we ask for would be easily granted.

I came out to my parents eight years later. I was living in San Francisco by then. As I said, they have always known. Coming out was both a relief and a burden. Whenever my mother would visit from Manila, she would worry each night I stepped out the door, asking what time I’d be home and to where I was going, understandably so. In those days, especially in the Philippines, the media coverage on homosexuals in America was largely focused on promiscuity and diseases. Mostly, though, my mother just didn’t want to be alone. I had been the child who would cry for Mommy to stay home, whose designated chair at the dining table was beside Mommy, who wanted Mommy by his side for now and always. A mother must often wonder at the man her baby son would someday grow to be. In the 50 years that Philomena never saw Michael, she thought of him every day, ached for him on his every birthday, always with an image in her head based on a single photograph taken when he was a toddler of how he must have evolved into the person he was meant to be.

One thing’s for sure: whatever ideas of a life a mother must entertain for her son, no way does she envision a hardcore club partier. Once, I came home at seven in the morning after an entire night of fun. My mother was seated on the hallway floor, crying. I had told her I’d be back at midnight. Since I was a no show, she went through my phone book and contacted my friends to inquire of my whereabouts, phoned my father in Manila for consolation, and sought advice from her own friend on filing a missing person report. I had not thought it obligatory to call her about my intention to be home later than stated. I was 27 years old. I did take her out to lunch to amend for my misstep. It was Mother’s Day.

That is what gives my mother happiness – being a mom. Worrying comes with the territory. With every visit, she stacks up on my necessities. In all the years I’ve been in San Francisco, I’ve had to buy toilet paper no more than half a dozen times. I only eat brown rice. So on her latest visit last summer, she demanded a trip to Trader Joe’s, where she – 4’11” and 78 years old – stood in line to purchase me a packet of healthy grains. And for each meal, she always asks, “What kind of food do you want? What can I cook for you? Do you want to eat out?”

Despite the physical rift between Philomena and Michael, the bond between them remains intact, growing stronger as the passing years enhance the need of one to find the other. Philomena is not alone in her journey. All his adult life, Michael had been searching for her, traveling near and far, his own determination unwavering.

As for me, I have called many cities home: Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila, Walnut Creek, Boston, Paris, Ithaca. Today it is San Francisco. Tomorrow, who knows? Whatever my path, it will, in the end, lead me to one destination – the final resting place of the woman who nurtured me to life.

 

The film “5 to 7” (2014) gets its title from the hours in France during which each half of a married couple is allowed to engage in an adulterous relationship. This is not to be mistaken for a fling. What transpires is neither clandestine nor transitory. We’re talking about a deep involvement, the sort where two individuals confide in one another life goals and childhood secrets and introduce family. Whether this is a newfangled French custom or one that dates back to the days of Marie Antoinette is beyond me. In the two years that I lived in Paris some 25 years ago, I was aware of the candid attitude the French have towards sexuality. Burlesque shows attract tourists of both genders young and old to applaud topless ladies as they perform trapeze acts. Hustlers in those days loitered at the Trocadero, and transvestite hookers conducted their business at the Bois de Bologne. They might still do. Then again, prostitution is universal. Consensual adultery, however, at a designated time after work and before dinner like a cocktail, now that’s something else. Had I been straight, I might have heard of this custom. I might have had a relationship with a gorgeous mother of two and wife to a diplomat in the manner our protagonist, Brian (Anton Yelchin), does with Arielle (Bérénice Marlohe). Instead, I have memories of a moment spent with a Swedish man. Nonetheless, love is love, and so potent is its alchemy that no matter our sexual orientation, we never get over it.

Unforgettable is the love between Brian and Arielle. They meet as Brian narrates that in New York, you are never more than 20 feet away from someone you want to know or are meant to know. Voila! She is right across the street from him, alone and puffing on a cigarette. He says something in French since he assumes only a French lady can smoke with such elegance, and he is right. Arielle has the accent, the wit, and the sophistication that Americans find oh so irresistible in a European so that even when he initially tells her that he cannot, on moral grounds, get involved with a married woman, he cannot keep away. Brian is drawn to Arielle as a flower is to the sun.

We, too, are drawn to Arielle. The woman shines in every scene. Brian’s last name of Bloom is metaphorical because bloom he does. The unconventionality of the relationship gives their trysts a dose of passion on some days and, on others, the semblance of domestic comfort. Their love is so perfect that Brian wants to marry the woman regardless of the age difference (she is 33; he is 24); the trust of her husband (Lambert Wilson) in him to honor the five to seven code; and her obligations as a parent. Love makes a man out of the boy. Arielle wants Brian just as badly. In addition to being a commendable bed partner (“your body expresses what’s in your heart”), he is a writer destined to reach dizzying heights. He has a story published in The New Yorker, which the editor-in-chief describes as possessing “a hint of greatness,” and gets paid $6,000 for it. Sure. Anyway, Brian is a “great” writer in love with a beautiful woman who loves him back, only perfection being the fragile thing that it is, the five to seven rendezvous enter precarious territory.

Life for our couple works out the way it is meant to. Let me simply say that they attain a state of happily ever after that I understand; I myself have this happiness. Jonas and I met when I was 23 and he was 38, in a video bar on a moon-lit street in Paris. In collarless tee and jeans, he was standing by a post, tall with soft curls of dark hair and arms folded to flatter developed shoulders. Striking as he was, it was his smile that was the clincher – warm, glowing, and directed at me. The man was offering his heart from across the room. During the metro ride to his place, Jonas told me of his youth in boarding school, the rampant homosexuality among the boys; his mother’s initial rejection of him upon his coming out and her ultimate acceptance; and his current ex-lover, whom he was assisting through mental illness and alcoholism. He told me of his zeal for soccer, skiing, horse betting, and weight lifting. Jonas was an oncologist with a wide scope of the world. Whatever it was of myself I shared, he said, “Say, you’re very intelligent.” That was how much we impressed each other in a span of 30 minutes. That was how intimate we became.

In case you’re wondering what I was doing in Paris, I had graduated from Tufts University in Boston the year before and had returned to the City of Lights to be a writer, there where I had spent my junior year as a foreign student, a place that with monuments for buildings was an outdoor museum. Walking its streets connected me to the creative giants through the course of history. Though I knew not on what subject to exert my talent, I was aware that every moment unfolding before me was a possible source of inspiration. As with Brian and Arielle, the stars for me and Jonas aligned to bring us together at this crossroad in our lives. For one night, our words and our bodies were in harmony like notes to music. “I like you a lot,” he said. “I like you, too,” I said. Alas, it had to end at sunrise. Jonas was returning to Sweden in two days. I was moving to San Francisco in two weeks.

Although we never saw each again, we kept in touch by letter for over a year. Jonas’s health began to deteriorate from HIV soon after we parted. He would draw me flowers and express his longing to see the sun in the midst of a freezing winter. We were closing our letters with expressions of love, then I stopped hearing from him. I would have wanted to have known him more, to have spent more days with him, weeks, months and years. But we can manipulate a situation only to a certain point. After that, we need to trust fate.

Brian in “5 to 7” pays homage to Arielle by publishing a novel about their affair. He titles it “The Mermaid,” an allusion to their first meeting in which he tells her that she shares the same name as the Disney princess of the sea, a siren who rises from the depths of the dark unknown to find life and love on land. Fate brought me to Jonas, and fate chose for our moment to last a night. Because of its brevity, I will till my last breath remember him as perfect.

I’ve written my own novel to immortalize him. As Brian says, “Your favorite story, whatever it may be, was written for one person.” How true that is, and how blessed I am to have met someone to make me believe in love at first sight, the splendor of fairy tales.

An article I read when “The Pianist” (2002) was in theaters explained the increasing volume of Holocaust films in the second millennium. It stated that as survivors of the horrific event age and pass on, it is all the more important to preserve their history in cinema. I have seen quite a few Holocaust films, and it is fascinating that even though they all revolve around one subject, each is different from the other. The most recent is “Woman in Gold” (2015). Perhaps the reason it continues to move me is that I saw it only a couple of weeks ago, so it is fresh in my memory. But I have a feeling it will stay with me for a long time. Helen Mirren is in it, and no film can go wrong with her.

“Woman in Gold” is the true story of Maria Altmann’s redemption for a choice of life over death that has haunted her for 60 years. Altmann (Helen Mirren) is a Los Angeles boutique owner who, with her husband Fritz (Max Irons), fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, leaving behind her family and personal effects, including a Gustav Klimt painting after which the film is titled. It is a portrait of her Aunt Adele (Antje Traue), a woman she looked up to as a second mother. Under Austria’s restitution law of 1990 that examines the Austrian government’s ownership of art works the Nazis pillaged, Altmann seeks the help of lawyer Randol Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) to reclaim the portrait. They go to Austria, where they encounter recalcitrant bureaucrats and legal ramifications, all of which make for scenes of courtroom drama in both Vienna and the City of Angels. But the fight against unjust jurisdiction is not what lies at the core of “Woman in Gold.” It is guilt.

“I left them here,” Altmann laments of her parents to Schoenberg after the judge rules in her favor. Spectators to the trial are in the courtroom, applauding the verdict. It is unequivocally a victory of reparation for a war crime. However, Altmann chooses not to celebrate. Instead, she looks out a vestibule window at children playing in the garden, remembering perhaps her idyllic childhood in a country to which she had sworn never to return because of a war that sent her parents to perish in a concentration camp. On the day she fled, father (Allan Corduner) and mother (Nina Kunzendorf) bid their last request of their daughter (Tatiana Maslany): live, be happy, and remember them. Robbed of mementos and photographs, journeying on to freedom in possession of nothing more than the clothes on her person, Altmann would abide by their dying wish for the rest of her life. Yet we wonder what nightmares of her parents’ fate must have plagued her as well as what guilt. That it is the natural inclination of a parent to sacrifice one’s own life for a child does not assuage the albatross of remorse on the survivor’s conscience. Neither does reclaiming an object that is a tangible link to the past.

And yet, the battle was worth it because even though the dead can never be resurrected, Altmann at long last has among her belongings a thing of beauty in which their spirits will live forever. Hers is a triumph that speaks to us all, for her plight had been that of humanity. We see it today. As we obsess over “The Game of Thrones,” actual beheadings occur in Iraq. 20 years ago, America’s fixation with reality TV coincided with the reciprocated genocide of the Hutu and Tutsi tribes in Rwanda. A decade before that, the novelty of M.T.V. overshadowed the catastrophe that was Lebanon. Yes, we are aware of world events, though as other people’s stories rather than our own. Our personal world revolves around recreational preoccupations.

Such was the case when Jewish refugees attempted to escape persecution in Europe on the brink of World War II. The United Kingdom and the United States turned them away, sending them back to their places of origin where they would meet their doom. Meanwhile, those who didn’t know any better danced the swing to the music of Benny Goodman. One country did open its ports to the Jews – the Philippines. From 1937 to 1941, President Manuel Quezon collaborated with a group of Jewish-American businessmen residing in Manila to transport 1,200 Jews from Europe to the Philippines. A compound for the émigrés underwent construction in Mindanao, where they would have thrived and contributed to the community as they had in their original homelands. The plan was to welcome 10,000 Jews, but then Pearl Harbor thwarted Quezon’s vision. 24 hours after the Hawaiian military base was attacked, the Japanese Imperial Army marched into Manila, putting the Philippines at war with Germany’s ally in the Far East.

Although World War II was 25 years before I was born, it is a part of my history by virtue of my parents. My father was 11 and my mother was five when the war in the Pacific erupted. My father once told me that he had thought the bomb blasts he saw from his window illuminating the night sky over Manila were fireworks. Four years later, he would be squatting in a building when the Imperial forces, in the fury of defeat, systematically raped women, then bayoneted every Filipino in the capital. My mother has accounts of the Japanese seizing the grand house she lived in as their headquarters and of a Japanese general’s harboring such a fondness for her that the general would take her on rides astride his horse. Both parents lost their homes in the end. They were burned to the ground. It’s the same story with every war. World leaders express hostilities, but it’s the blood of the citizens that redden the land. Those who survive to tell the tale speak of rebuilding life from nothing, like castaways of a shipwreck.

Now if we still haven’t empathized with such disgrace, consider the calamities of nature in our own backyard. Autumn in the East Coast isn’t what it used to be 30 years ago. When I moved to Boston for college from the Philippines, it may have been cold with some rainy days, but never did a storm occur of biblical proportions. Then in 2012, Hurricane Sandy flooded Manhattan, damaging even the most upscale of properties and smashing automobiles against edifice walls with the ease it would have a piece of lumber. When Sandy passed, the brutality of winter left cars stranded on highways and generated reports of people freezing to death. Let’s not forget Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans seven years earlier that resulted in a fatality count of close to 2,000 and scores of homeless. News footage of shoes, picture frames, and table lamps strewn across a landscape of flattened houses conjured the horror of a war zone. No doubt sacrifices had been made in which individuals had to choose between saving themselves and saving their loved ones.

This brings me back full circle to “Woman in Gold”: live, be happy, and remember. We can have our home and family torn away from us at any moment. We can be forced to make a choice between life and death that we could regret for the rest of our lives. As a San Franciscan, I live with the threat of loss every day. An earthquake could strike this instant. If the earth were to devour everything I own, then all I would truly have left are remembrances. However, remembrances would not be enough. As mortals, we are subject in time to the frailties of the human condition so that inevitably our memory will fail us. Hence, while we are able, we strive to retain all that is sacred in our hearts through the poetry of words and the light of cinema. Once in a while, we gain immortality through brush strokes so divine that they create a national treasure priced at $100 million. Although none of this may ease the pain of a parting, they’re the best we can do to honor lives sacrificed.

Cinema is a treasure trove of moments so haunting in their depiction of human relations that they become as much a part of us as the memory of a first kiss or a last parting. One of those jewels is the scene in “The Lives of Others” (2006), the Oscar-winning film about government corruption in East Berlin, where informant Hauptman Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) dissolves into tears as he listens, through bugs he planted, to a piano sonata performed by the playwright he is spying on. Playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) is mourning the loss of a friend (Volkmar Kleinert) whom he just learned has hung himself. “Sonata for a Good Man” is the kind of music that evokes the image of a figure alone in the light of a weeping moon – dolorous, tortured. Dreyman does not play it with the theatrics one would in a concert hall; rather, he hunches over the keyboard a broken man and he asks, “You know what Lenin said about Beethoven’s ‘Appasionata’? ‘If I keep listening to it, I won’t finish the revolution.’ Can anyone who has heard this music, I mean truly heard it, really be a bad person?” The recipient to the question is his girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), muse and actress to his plays.

Wiesler is a loyal Stasi, a secret government police. Throughout his profession, he has heard by subterfuge numerous accusations of corruption against his leaders, and he has acted upon his power to incarcerate the accusers. In a system of governing that rewards blind obedience, he has spent his entire life viewing his fellow countrymen through a funnel. His subordinates fear him. His superiors trust him. Suddenly, it so turns out everyone locked up because of him could be right; those above him to whom he has pledged allegiance are indeed bad. By virtue of his commitment to them, so is he.

When “The Lives of Others” was released, it received international acclaim. In addition to the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, it obtained awards in Bavaria, France, and Great Britain. Critics lauded it as one of the ten best films of 2007. It’s appeal is not Eurocentric. I saw “The Lives of Others” upon its screening in American theaters and later watched it with my family during Christmas holidays in the Philippines some years after. Everyone from my nephews, then aged 16 to 26, responded to it as did my sister, brother-in-law, and parents. The film’s impact is that it exceeds the boundaries of political history. It is, at its heart, the story of a man’s vivification as he comes to understand and embrace those he has been conditioned to condemn.

Art is a potent weapon in the fight for our freedom to be seen and heard, for our right to individual expression. The noble characters in “The Lives of Others” are a writer, an actress, and a composer. Activist students marching with fists in the air are not what awaken Wiesler’s soul. It is music. And poetry. Enter Bertolt Brecht:

On a certain day in blue-moon September, beneath a young plum tree, I held her there, my silent pale love, in my arms like a fair and lovely dream. Above us in the summer skies was a cloud that caught my eye. It was white and so immensely high. And when I looked up, it was no longer there.

So forsaken is Wiesler that his investment in the assignment has switched from sedition to the shared domestic life between Dreyman and Sieland: the quarrels; the morning greetings and evening well wishes; the opinion on a tie; and the sounds of lovemaking.

Conscious of it or not, we are all involved with the lives of others. Last night, while waiting for the underground Muni, I saw a blond boy in his early 20s, in owl glasses and black sneakers and with a condition that caused his leg to shake while he stood stationary. I wondered about the bullying that tormented him as a child on account of his leg, his loneliness, his pain. Then I envied him. He was smiling because he had a friend, another young man, one who was large and hefty and who held him in a way that made it evident they were in love.

That is what I do every day in forming a connection to the world; I observe people – couples on the street holding hands, in a café sipping from the same straw, laughing in harmony; parents; newlyweds; pairs both young and old. I am drawn to lovers. “How would you define love?” someone once asked me. “Good question,” I said. “I don’t know.” Though I have my own ideas, none of it is anything I have ever whispered into another’s ear. Neither have I ever been called upon to prove them. Everybody else, it seems, is more of an expert on the subject than I, even a boy whose nerves are shot and who has, as his saving grace, nothing more than a smile. I am that close to eavesdropping on the intimacies of others.

None of us wants to see ourselves as a Wiesler – strained and alienated – and we are fortunate to be in a country that honors the democratic oath of free speech and civil dignity. Anything from critiques to insults is game in the comments section that follows an online article. We vote. We speak either for or against marriage equality. We denounce censorship of the press. We have kiss-in protests and porn and dating services. Nevertheless, for all we do so that the powers that be will acknowledge our needs, we can feel so very invisible. Government has nothing to do with it. It’s just part of being human.

For this reason, Wiesler is the character in “The Lives of Others” with whom I most identify. It’s my own doing. I’ve spent too many years endeavoring to emulate the image of the ideal man I have in in my head that I foil opportunities for intimacy. On the other hand, I am blessed to have Dreyman’s prowess with words and Sieland’s gift for drama. With stories I weave, I can caress the hearts of people from the subways of Manhattan to the sands of Boracay. I can be everything that I have wanted to be, but am unable to in reality.

Writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck makes a clear statement in this movie hailed far and wide as a masterpiece: as the eyes, ears, and mouth of the human race, the artist is never alone.