Brillante Mendoza‘s films, social realist to the core, tend to focus on marginalized people in Manila struggling to get by in gritty circumstances. The prolific Filipino auteur (24 credits in 11 years) won the Best Director award at Cannes for his Kinatay, and the electrifying Ma’ Rosa continues in a similar thematic vein.
Phil Dy is one of the most prominent Filipino film writers working today, a staunch advocate for the emerging cinema of the Philippines and a sharp, vocal critic of institutional problems in the industry.
He’s also the co-curator of New Filipino Cinema 2016, a film series screening through July 3rd at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Insiang, Lino Brocka’s celebrated 1976 melodrama of the Manila slums and the first Filipino film to ever screen at Cannes, opens with several ghastly, uninterrupted minutes inside a slaughterhouse.
It’s dirty, bloody, and brutal – pigs, hung upside down, bleed out from hastily punctured throats, before being tossed into vats of boiling water.