The Directors’ Fortnight at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival presented two works by the same director, Batch 81 and Kisapmata. Like Ishmael Bernal, Peque Gallaga, Kidlat Tahimik and Lino Brocka, Mike de Leon is one of the most courageous and talented voices of the golden era of Filipino cinéma d’auteur under Marcos’s martial law. Son and grandson of an artistic family (his grandmother, Narcisa ‘Sisang’ de Leon, was the matriarch behind LVN, one of the four historic Filipino film studios of the 1930s, 40s and 50s), de Leon founded his own independent company Cinema Artists Philippines, with which he produced Lino Brocka’s masterpiece Manila in the Claws of Light (1975), a film he also worked on as the cinematographer. Brocka and de Leon shot at night to get around the regime’s attempts to silence them.: “We are stray directors,” Brocka later said. Their names were closely tied together: protesters among the protesters and militant filmmakers. The tyranny and violence that pervade family life in Kisapmata reflect the erasure of civil rights in Marcos’s advertised ‘New Society’. “Rebellion has no chance of succeeding in the Philippines” – de Leon once said –“The reason is simple: no one rebels against the arbitrariness and the horror”. De Leon’s condemns the extreme right’s radicalism and violence, the myths of the Filipino middle class. of the Filipino middle-class (the family, the armed forces) as well as the widespread Americanesque consumerism.

Cecilia Cenciarelli