Citizen Artist Activist... Lino Brocka

The artist is always a participant. Instead of working in his ivory tower, the filmmaker is a citizen of the slum, of the streets, of the battlefields if need be […] We want to do works that will hurt, films that will disturb, films that will not make you rest. For the times are really bad, and given times like these, it is a crime to rest.

Lino Brocka

Lino Brocka (1939-1991) made more than 60 films between 1970 and his death in a car accident twenty one years later. He grew up poor and homosexual, in a country that didn’t have care for either of those things. He became a Mormon, worked in a leper colony in Hawaii, renounced religion, saw the light, converted to cinema.

In 1974, he made what is widely regarded as the greatest Filipino movie, Manila in the Claws of Light, and a couple of years later another contender for that title, Insiang. Bona (1980) is another top five movie. All three combine melodrama with social realism.

They show the country for what is and bristle with anger at a system of oppression. All this under the brutal Marcos dictatorship marked by thousands of extrajudicial killings, torture, and tens of thousands of political prisoners.

Brocka is a figurehead not only for Filipinos, though certainly he is the greatest of all Filipino filmmakers; he is a figurehead for those artists who would champion the marginalized and the exploited even through the hardest times; who would speak truth to power and refuse to back down. This is the cinema of resistance, and now is an ideal time to remember his example. In the words of Pierre Rissient, “To watch Brocka’s films is to be burned by a flame that never goes out.”

Our spotlight on Lino Brocka includes the new 4K restoration of Bona, starring Nora Aunor, a film that was thought lost in a warehouse fire until a print turned up in France recently, plus Insiang, and a VIFF Live event combining Manila in the Claws of Light with a performance from Filipino Canadian pianist Victor Noriega and his “kuyatet” (Kuya means brother in Tagalog). We’re also showing video artist Khavn De La Cruz’s tribute film, National Anarchist.