Tito Valiente, Bicol Cultural Scholar and Film Critic, Dies at 70

Tito Valiente, the writer and film scholar who directed the Institute of Bikol History and Culture at Ateneo de Naga University, died on Saturday, 22 August, at the age of 70. The National Commission for Culture and the Arts announced the death and credited him with a career spent promoting and preserving Bicol culture.

Tito Valiente’s career and books

He was born on 11 December 1955 on Ticao Island in Masbate and raised in Naga City. Both places do real work in the biography. Ticao is small enough to be left out of most national accounts of anything, and it became the subject of his best known book. Naga is where the career happened.

He directed the Institute of Bikol History and Culture at Ateneo de Naga University. He sat on the NCCA’s National Committee on Cinema, representing film critics and journalists. He wrote a long-running newspaper column on Bicol culture, history, literature and the arts. Ateneo de Naga University Press published his books, among them The Last Sacristan Mayor and the Most Expensive Mass of the Dead: Tales from Ticao, in 2017.

He was also part of the group behind Savage Mind, the cultural hub and bookstore on Peninsula Street in Barangay Tinago, Naga City. It is managed by the filmmaker and author Kristian Cordero of Nabua, Camarines Sur, one of his long-standing collaborators.

Cinema as a record of society

The NCCA’s description of his work is more specific than tribute language usually gets. It says he brought an anthropologist’s perspective to media criticism and treated cinema as a record of society rather than entertainment.

That is a method, not a compliment. Reading a film as a record means asking what a society was willing to show about itself, what it left out, and who was in the room when those choices got made. Applied to Bicol, it turns local films, rituals and silences into evidence rather than decoration. It also explains his push for regional and decentralised storytelling. If cinema records a society, then a country that records itself only from Manila keeps a thin archive.

What Bicol’s cultural scene loses

Regional cultural work runs on a small number of people who hold an institutional post, publish, teach, and keep a venue open at the same time. Tito Valiente held several of those roles at once. Directing an institute, sitting on a national cinema committee, writing a weekly column and helping run a bookstore are four jobs, and in a larger cultural economy they’d belong to four people.

So what goes isn’t only a scholar. It’s a set of connections that ran through one person: a university to a national commission, an archive to a reading public, Ticao and Masbate to a printed page in Manila. Those links don’t transfer with the job titles.

What we still don’t know

• Cause of death, and where he died. Neither appears in what we have read.
• Wake and funeral arrangements. No dates or venue had been announced.
• Who takes over at the Institute of Bikol History and Culture, and his seat on the NCCA’s National Committee on Cinema. Both are working posts.
• Unfinished work. Whether manuscripts or research in progress exist, and who holds them.
• Where his papers go. For a scholar of local history the archive is the estate, and nothing we have read says its destination.

What to watch in the coming weeks

Three things would answer most of that. A statement from Ateneo de Naga University on the Institute and on his unpublished work. An announcement from the family on the wake. And whether Savage Mind or the university press moves to keep his column and his books in circulation, which is what decides whether a body of regional scholarship stays readable or quietly goes out of print.

Tito Valiente was 70, born on Ticao, and he spent a career insisting that where a story gets told from changes what the story can see.

Source Bicolmail Newspaper, reported 28 August 2026. Written from the original report.