Mga Nunal sa Dagat: Howie Severino’s documentary on I-Witness this Saturday

“We’re going to be tapping into our history to show how our most compelling subjects have changed over time,” says I-Witness host Howie Severino about the show’s anniversary episodes.

For the past four weeks, the pioneering and longest-running documentary program has shown viewers how conditions have changed in some of the its most memorable stories since they were first told.

This Saturday, November 30, the show airs its fifth special episode to celebrate its 20^th anniversary. Revisiting an overcrowded tiny island in the open sea, Howie and his team chance upon a life-and-death scene on the beach. An old man holds his small, limp grandchild retrieved from the water as others try to revive the small boy.

As the old man turns he and Howie recognize each other from a previous encounter on the same island 15 years before.

That was for an early I-Witness documentary that explored how so many people could live without natural supply of water on the sandy, infertile island near Cebu. For I-Witness’s 20th anniversary, Howie’s team, now composed of younger colleagues, return to Caubian Island, where they survived their own brush with danger in the open sea, and discovered the various ways poor fisherfolk adapt to harsh conditions.

This time, Howie and his team find that the population has doubled, the island has shrunk, and the conditions have become even harsher. Yet the islanders enjoy a happy community life, unprepared for any disasters from the sea or the risks of total isolation.

The documentarists explore a lush adjacent island that is barely inhabited. Could this be the solution to the woes of the overcrowded Caubian Island?

And what of the old man and his grandchild? The visitors were there to witness how this incident unfolded, illustrating yet another challenge of living on a dot in the sea.

“There’s always a very interesting story when you do that and I think that is one of the main advantages of I-Witness – we’ve got all of this history that we can dig into to show how things have changed or how things have not changed,” shares Howie. “I think it’s an opportunity to kind of show not just the best of what our show has produced, but basically show the best that our society has produced in terms of just compelling stories and both the highs and lows of what we’ve gone through in the last 20 years,” he ends.

Catch “Mga Nunal sa Dagat” this Saturday on I-Witness, after Studio 7 on GMA-7.

Kapuso viewers from across the globe can also catch their favorite Kapuso shows via GMA’s international channels GMA Pinoy TV, GMA Life TV, and GMA News TV International. For the program guide, visit www.gmapinoytv.com.