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MANILA, Philippines — Filipino director and writer Mike De Leon’s films will be screened at the Debra and Leon Black Family Film Center at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art (MoMa) from November 1 to 30.
According to MoMa’s official website, the “complete retrospective” will premiere in North America for the first time, showcasing all of De Leon’s feature films and shorts alongside “surviving classics” from the 1930s to ’60s. MoMa dubbed him as a “Self-Portrait of a Filipino Filmmaker.”
“De Leon’s own films mix the genres of melodrama, crime, supernatural horror, slapstick comedy, and the musical with blisteringly critical stances toward his country’s history of corruption and cronyism, state-sponsored violence, feudalist exploitation, and populist machismo,” MoMa wrote about De Leon.
Moma cited the “festering legacies of the nation’s colonial past made even more purulent by the dictatorships of Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte” as real-life examples of these themes.
Mike De Leon is a Filipino filmmaker described as “one of Filipino cinema’s most fiercely political and dramatic storytellers in his own right.” He is best known for his works such as ITIM (The Rites of May) that premiered in Cannes this year, Kisapmata, Batch ’81, Manila in the Claws of Light, and Citizen Jake.
The retrospective will also show Signos, De Leon’s “defiantly subsersive anti-Marcos short” that he made in 1983 along with an underground group of filmmakers and activists. – Rappler.com
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