Sat

22/06

Jolly Cinema > 16:00

BONA

Lino Brocka
Introduced by

Vincent Paul Boncour (Carlotta Films) and Cecilia Cenciarelli

Projection
Info

Saturday 22/06/2024
16:00

Subtitle

Original version with subtitles

BONA

Film Notes

A student from the Filipino middle class, Bona becomes infatuated with Gardo, a narcissistic, womanising B-movie actor. Her father’s violence towards her after discovering that the two spent the night together prompts Bona to abandon her family and move in with Gardo. Completely subjugated by the man, she ends up serving as his servant and mother. The melodrama mounts to a cathartic denouement.
“To claim that Lino Brocka has influenced our cinema is not accurate. Lino Brocka is part of our DNA, part of our national psyche,” said Lav Diaz, one of the icons of contemporary Filipino cinema. Coming to international attention thanks to Pierre Rissient in the mid1970s, Brocka’s cinema has imposed itself with disruptive force since his first appearance at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight in 1978.
Brocka is a master of neorealist melodrama with a natural instinct toward experimentation, and his legacy is an extraordinary example of popular cinema that has become fierce political criticism. Bona is no exception: “I revised the screenplay. I was not interested in making another Adèle H., my story goes well beyond amour fou,” Brocka said. Rather, the film looks at women’s subjugation in patriarchal Philippine society, as well as the alienation and violence of a system in which repression is the dominant mode. Bona’s “descent into the underworld” – which takes place in the slums, amid dilapidated shacks, open sewers and garbage bonfires – is reminiscent of that of two other powerful female figures portrayed by Brocka, that of Ligaya Paraiso (in Manila in the Claws of Light, 1974) and Insiang (from the 1976 film of the same name), both masterfully played by Hilda Koronel. They, too, are daughters of institutionalised subjugation, allegories of the Marcos dictatorship and the martial laws that strangled the Philippines and against which Brocka mobilised with all his might, paying direct consequences.

Cecilia Cenciarelli

Cast and Credits

Scen.: Cenen Ramones. F.: Conrado Baltazar. M.: Augusto Salvador. Scgf.: Joey Luna. Mus.: Max Jocson. Int.: Nora Aunor (Bona), Philip Salvador (Gardo), Rustica Carpio (padre di Bona), Venchito Galvez (madre di Bona), Spanky Manikan (fratello di Bona), Marissa Delgado (Katrina), Nanding Josef (Nilo). Prod.: Nora Villamayor. DCP. D.: 86’ Col.