
Synopsis: A female movie fan idolizes a movie bit-player who becomes her obsession. Her unrequited love for him leads to a nightmarish end.Read More »

Synopsis: A female movie fan idolizes a movie bit-player who becomes her obsession. Her unrequited love for him leads to a nightmarish end.Read More »

Set during the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines between 1942 and 1944. Rosario (Nora Aunor), a young schoolteacher, is engaged to be married to Crispin (Bembol Roco). Crispin leaves Rosario to fight the Japanese as a guerilla, and in his absence a Japanese-Filipino officer named Masugi (Christopher de Leon) rapes her. Masugi later returns to Rosario apologizing for his act, bearing gifts of canned food and rice which Rosario at first refuses. Matters are complicated when Rosario’s father Mang Andoy (Mario Escudero) is arrested by the Japanese and Rosario reveals to Masugi that she is pregnant. Rosario must make a choice: accept Masugi’s proposal to make her his wife (saving her father and ensuring a safe and stable life for her child), or reject him and with him the baby they have conceived together.Read More »


A Bajau midwife copes with the irony of her own infertility amid the deprivations of her gypsy community in Tawi-Tawi. A saga of island life stuck between the devil of passion and the deep blue sea of tradition.Read More »


Quote:
Bona, released in 1980, is perhaps his best–regarded work. The title character is a young, starstruck schoolgirl (played by Nora Aunor) who falls in love with an ageing actor (Phillip Salvador) and becomes his servant. She waits on him loyally in his decrepit shack, receiving nothing for her labors but the privilege of being his slave. When the actor decides he has had enough of her and attempts to toss her aside, Bona retaliates in a wholly unexpected, utterly justified fit of violent rage. As with many of his other independently made films, Bona reveals Brocka’s uncanny ability to join the personal and the political, to locate the overarching social statement in an intimate, deeply individualized gesture. Read More »


PLOT: Living near the US Clark Air Base, Corazon de la Cruz dreams of a better life in America… until the unspeakable happens.Read More »


Quote:
The situation is ordinary enough: a woman (Nora Aunor) falls in love with a man (Dennis Roldan). To say that she “loves” him, however, is an oversimplication, because he is a retardate. What she feels is a mixture of pity, sympathy, maternal love, and -of course sexual love for him. On the other hand, though a mere child as far as his brain is concerned, he is physically grown-up, as portrayed in a clever drunken scene where he mimics raping the mistress of a neighbor. There’s no doubt about it: Mario O’Hara is a major director. In Bakit Bughaw ang Langit?, he tackles the same basic situation Lino Brocka deals with in Bona. In the comparison Brocka suffers. Where Bona fails, Bakit Bughaw ang Langit? succeeds.
– Isagani Cruz, Movie TimesRead More »
Quote:
Bulaklak sa City Jail–1984 Metro Manila Film Festival’s grand slam winner–is a tale of female empowerment in a patriarchal society, an exercise in observation of its female characters struggling to survive in the cruel society and a revelation of the many injustices, gendered or not, that Filipinos encounter in their lifetime.Read More »