Insiang

Director: Lino Brocka

1976 / 94min / DCP

The first Filipino film to screen at Cannes, Brocka’s raw, biting character study shares its name with its woebegone heroine, a beautiful, headstrong child of the Manila slums whose home life consists of endless drudgery, brutalization and beratement by her embittered mother, and trying to fend off the relentless advances of her mother’s loutish lover. Brocka limits the action of his film to the cramped confines of Insiang’s home, and this, along with the caged animal desperation that Hilda Koronel brings to the title role, combine to create a suffocating intensity rarely found in the movies. The inevitable explosion seems inevitable, but isn’t merely cathartic, and its shockwaves resonate long after one has left the cinema.