Signed: Lino Brocka

Winner of the 1988 Peace Film Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, Christian Blackwood’s portrait shows the filmmaker at work shooting several scenes (often surrounded by crowds of on-lookers, just as we see in Bona). The filmmaker also reflects candidly on his life and career, his sexuality and political convictions — including his disgust for the Marcoses. Yet he’s frank and funny about the pragmatic compromises he has been forced to endure in order to keep making films in the commercial sector. Brocka’s acute sense of the ins and outs of the film industry, his deep understanding of the underlying truths of Philippine societal issues, and his playful, subversive eye as filmmaker allowed him to leave a legacy far greater than the sum of its parts after his untimely death in a car crash in 1991.

Documentaries about film-makers are generally a major snooze, but Lino Brocka tells tales that could cure deafness. Blackwood has the good sense to simply let him rip, and he ranges freely over his extraordinary life story, his attachment to the city’s slum-dwellers, his struggle to make movies of adult interest, and his troubles with successive Filipino governments. Most movingly, Brocka comes out as gay. The combustible mixture of sex, radicalism and soap generates more heat than many a fiction film.

Tony Rayns, Time Out

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