Lino Brocka - Kill the National Artist
Lino Brocka - Matem o artista nacional
Cinema
Friday 16 October · until 29 Oct
Cinemateca Portuguesa, in partnership with Doclisboa, presents a retrospective of Lino Brocka, the most influential filmmaker of Filipino cinema, with a significant sample of the more than 60 films he made before dying at 52.
When I was young, I saw Fellini's NIGHTS OF CABIRIA and René Clément's FORBIDDEN GAMES. I cried and cried at the cinema. Having come to know the characters as intimately as the members of my family, I felt an integral part of humanity, I felt vindicated. Thus, watching films became an obsession. I watched and watched so many films that I had to make them. I wanted to touch strangers I had never seen and would never see. I wanted to make people cry at the cinema, to fill them with humanity." This is how the most influential filmmaker in the history of the wonderfully rich Filipino cinema answered the question "Why do you make films?", in a supplement celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Cannes Festival. (...) Brocka did not betray his roots and, in cinema, he learned to play the double game that allowed him to stay active, between cinema and television, while at the same time taking part, civically and politically, in the defence of the weakest — the first and main victims of the regime of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. (...) That being so, let us attempt a new introduction: behold a filmmaker of tireless nonconformity, who made melodrama his main "semiotic strategy" for facing and dismantling the web woven by a sibylline and implacable dictatorship. (...) This programme, put together with Doclisboa and created in dialogue with Khavn, a multifaceted artist, scholar and champion of Brocka's work around the world, will present a significant sample of the surviving and available titles among the more than 60 works the filmmaker made over his intense career, cut short only by a car accident that claimed his life prematurely at 52. Cinemateca Portuguesa. Programme here. Doclisboa Philippines Lino Brocka retrospective.