web - (HERO) Insiang 1 copy
"Marx, Melodrama and Marcos": Lino Brocka from the Mid-1970s to the Early 1980s - Wed 29 Oct - Wed 5 Nov 2025

The Melbourne Cinémathèque & ACMI present

Marx, Melodrama and Marcos: Lino Brocka from the Mid-1970s to the Early 1980s

Film program

When

Wed 29 Oct - Wed 5 Nov 2025

See below for additional related events

Still the Philippines’ most revered auteur, Catalino Ortiz (“Lino”) Brocka (1939–1991) was a prolific filmmaker whose strident activism both within his cinematic oeuvre and off-screen made him a reliable thorn in the side of Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship (1965–1986).

Raised a Catholic in poverty who then converted to Mormonism, the openly gay Brocka rose to fame locally at the outset of the 1970s as a director churning out well-received studio films at a frantic clip. However, upon Marcos’ 1972 declaration of martial law, he changed tack to run avowedly counter to the regime’s demands that cinema only present a sugar-coated picture of a notionally booming Philippines. Brocka’s cinema instead focused increasingly upon the hardscrabble lives of the nation’s hidden underclasses, even incorporating documentary sequences to attest to the routine squalor and danger experienced by lowest-caste Filipinos.

His first two masterworks, Manila in the Claws of Light (1975) and Insiang (1976) – the latter the first Filipino film to screen at Cannes – are exemplary cases in point, shot on location in Manila slums where it was expressly forbidden to film and yoking Marxist neo-realism to searing melodrama. Both of these key films feature in this season alongside recent digital restorations of Bona (1980) and Cain and Abel (1982), two lurid subsequent classics that further speak to the socio-politically engaged greatness of the work of a filmmaker whose career was in no way slowing down when his life was tragically ended in a car crash in 1991.

Where

Cinema 1, Level 2
ACMI, Fed Square

Plan your visit

Membership options

Mini membership
(3 consecutive weeks)
$30.5–36

Annual memberships
$174–325

SEE FULL OPTIONS

Films in this program (Wed 29 Oct - Wed 5 Nov 2025)

There are no upcoming related events at this time.

About Melbourne Cinémathèque

Australia's longest-running film society, Melbourne Cinémathèque screens significant works of international cinema in the medium they were created, the way they would have originally screened.

Melbourne Cinémathèque is self-administered, volunteer-run, not-for-profit and membership-driven. 

Learn more | View the 2025 program | See membership options

Melbourne Cinémathèque - Dirk Bogarde in a still from Victim

Join our newsletter

Get updates on the latest news, exhibitions, programs, special offers and more.

You might also like