Lino Brocka in San Francisco

I was recently asked for some comments on Lino Brocka by cinesource magazine, a filmmakers' industry newspaper in the Bay Area. Four films by Brocka are being shown at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival in March, 2010. You can find the report here.

www.cinesourcemagazine.com

My original comments which I sent them are below.

Lino Brocka

I invited Lino Brocka to Hong Kong when I premiered his masterpiece INSIANG in our Hong Kong International Film Festival after its debut at Cannes. Over the years that I knew him, Lino was a dynamo of energy whose mind and body were in perpetual motion, a man who constantly seemed to live on the brink of financial collapse (he wanted to talk more to me about his finances than his films!), and an eternal optimist who somehow kept making great movies. We last spoke in Los Angeles where he was visiting family. He was full of gossip and plans for the future. A few weeks (or was it months later?), he was dead. When I think back on Lino, what strikes me is that he is certainly one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century and in the first rank of classic Asian filmmakers along with Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa.

Knowing Lino made his films all the more interesting to me because they are not exactly reflections of his high-strung energy, of his ebullient outward personality. Rather, they are somewhat quiet contemplations about the individual and society, and how individuals at first victims of social injustice try to fight back. Whether they succeed or not is the chronic condition of Filipino life, as lived in Lino’s time especially under the corruption and cronyism of the Marcos dictatorship. Often his protagonists were women who suffer oppression in both their personal and work lives – think of Insiang, and Bona – these great titular roles of films which present their heroines manipulated by both men and women to whom they are close. As an openly gay, politically outspoken filmmaker, Lino clearly identified with this oppression and the need to fight it.

Lino’s depth of understanding of his society – an understanding sprung from personal condition, artistic intuition and political insight – meant that his films proceed from the basis of his audience, not the filmmaker’s ego, and that is what makes him a great artist. His cinema is not about “me” as so many of today’s films shamelessly proclaim, but about the respect of “you.” And his audience responded, at home and abroad. His domestic audience was largely working-class, and I suspect, mostly women who were drawn to the stars like Nora Aunor and Hilda Koronel. Through Lino’s lens, these stars gave dignity and value to their portrayals of working-class women in the audience.

A cinema based on an audience oppressed in a class society was Lino’s legacy, and it’s yet to be followed by today’s filmmakers perhaps because they do not fully understand the extent to which he was politically and socially engaged at the time (the younger generation of Filipinos have little idea of the destruction caused by the Marcos regime!). However in the past few years there have been retrospectives of Lino’s work beginning with the Torino Film Festival, Italy in 2005, and continuing in Vienna in 2009. Some of his works, like INSIANG, are now available on DVD and ready for a new generation to watch and understand. It’s timely that San Francisco will now get a chance to see some of his works on the big screen.