People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose
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THE PHILIPPINES / 2016 / Filipino, Tagalog / Color, B&W / Digital File / 89 min
Director, Editing: John Torres
Photography: Malay Javier, Jippy Pascua, Shireen Seno, Dennese Victoria
Sound: Mervine Aquino, Itos Ledesma, Christopher Lambert
Cast: Liz Alindogan, Elora Espano, Kim Perez, Anna J. Luna, Julienne Calugcug
Producers: John Torres, Ronald Arguelles
Production Companies: Los Otros Films, ABS-CBN Creative Programs
Source: ABS-CBN Creative Programs
In 1986, at the same time as the People Power Revolution (Edsa Revolution), Filipino director Celso Advento Castillo (1943–2012) started filming on an island south of Manila. Castillo is known as a director in various genres such as horror, suspense, and action, but he also made many soft porn films in the early 1970s that included moral lessons, known as “Bomba Films.” One of them was The Diary of Vietnam Rose, starring emerging erotic actor Liz Alindogan. It aimed to depict a fisherman and his family who escaped from the Vietnam War, but production had to be halted due to budget constraints. Director John Torres took the surviving footage thirty years later, and completed this unfinished work by mixing it with newly shot and recorded material featuring surviving members of the original cast. Dreams of film, dreams of politics, and people’s memories intersect in this work.
InterviewShowman
- USA / 1963 / English / B&W / 35mm (Original: 16mm) / 53 min
Directors, Photography, Producers: Albert Maysles, David Maysles
Editing: Daniel Williams, Tom Bywaters, Betsy Powell
Narration: Norman Rosten
Source: Maysles Films
This is one of the Maysles brothers’ early great works, a portrait of Joseph E. Levine, a well-known independent film producer. Brought up in the slums of Boston, Levine started his career as a small-scale film distributor, then achieved commercial success with his flashy advertising technique. He produced Two Women (1960), for which Sophia Loren received the Oscar for Best Actress. The camera captures this man without his awareness, as he works to sell films, showing his life surrounded by actresses, a reunion with his friends from childhood, and a discussion with David Susskind about art and product. This film was banned from theatrical release by Levine.
Meet Marlon Brando
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USA / 1966 / English / B&W / Digital File (Original: 16mm) / 29 min
Directors, Photography: Albert Maysles, David Maysles
Editing: Charlotte Zwerin
Source: Maysles Films
Journalists are interviewing Marlon Brando just before the release of a film in which he is starring. Though not keen on publicizing his own films, Brando keeps smiling, not treating them seriously, always answering with irony or wit. He asks questions back to the journalists, and when it comes to racial issues, he lets a woman who happened to pass by get involved in the discussion. Through the act of interviewing, the Maysles brothers investigate how an actor can be an object of consumption—and how he resists—recording the richness of the many different faces one can create through acting.