lb. Following the 14-year long struggle and uprising against the regime under Marcos Sr., the Philippine people succeeded in overturning his dictatorship in 1986. What remains in the general collective memory are the images of the peaceful “EDSA Revolution” with Cory Aquino, the widow of the assassinated opposition leader Benigno Aquino II, at the helm. What is less talked about is the underground militant struggle that eventually led to this moment of liberation. It outlasted the Marcos regime and, by some accounts, parts of its legacy bled into Duterte’s war on drugs three decades later. The 1989 film ‘Orapronobis’ (alternative title ‘Fight for Us’) by Lino Brocka, one of the Philippines’ most acclaimed directors, takes us back to the period shortly after the 1986 Revolution.
The team at Royal Scandal Cinema (royalscandalcinema.ch) have showcased movies from all over the world, each of which explore the intersection of scandalization and social change. Their project, which started back in 2015, aims to educate the general public on scandalization processes and establish an anthology of cinematic scandals. Their corpus spans a period from 1905 to 2024 and features the uncut and uncensored versions of the films, in the belief that it is never the film itself which is the actual scandal but rather the reception of the film that can unleash social negotiation processes by its ‘scandalization’. They have since organized multiple movie nights in Baden’s «Kulturlokal Royal», which are accompanied by an introductory discussion with individuals who can provide expert commentary.
Our co-founder Doris Bacalzo (PhD) will be the special guest for Royal Scandal Cinema’s showing of ‘Orapronobis’, which was banned by the Aquino administration at the time of its release. As a social-anthropologist from the University of the Philippines who experienced the EDSA revolution first-hand, she will provide the viewers with the necessary historical, political and sociological context, helping them better understand, among other things, the reasons for the ban. Orapronobis, which features icons like Phillip Salvador and Gina Alajar, is considered as one of Lino Brocka’s most celebrated films and seen as a symbol of how the Philippine people continue to reconcile their vision of ‘democracy’ with persisting inequalities within long-standing social structures.
