BONA (1980)
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Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
2:30 PM
Saturday 03 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
2:30 PM
Sunday 11 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 86 minutes
Country: Philippines
Language: Tagalog with English subtitles
Cast: Nora Aunor, Phillip Salvador
Director: Lino Brocka
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
2:30 PM
Saturday 03 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
2:30 PM
Sunday 11 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 86 minutes
Country: Philippines
Language: Tagalog with English subtitles
Cast: Nora Aunor, Phillip Salvador
Director: Lino Brocka
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
“As mordant in its way as the slyly subversive movies Luis Buñuel made in Mexico, Brocka’s two-fisted melodrama is a hellish, compelling work by a director … called ‘the great filmmaker of the ’70s.’” – J. Hoberman, New York Times.
Bona is a stark tale of a selfless middle-class Manila schoolgirl (Nora Aunor) who develops a fierce, morbid attachment to a narcissistic movie extra and abandons everything to devote her life to serving the actor. No humiliation he heaps upon her deters in any way. Aunor’s performance transforms the story into a profound portrait of a woman who finally doesn’t take it anymore…
Out of sight for over forty years since it premiered at Cannes in 1981, the restoration premiered at Cannes Classics in 2024 and since then it has screened at the New York and Toronto Film Festivals.
Introduced by Russell Edwards at Ritz Cinemas and Chris Luscri at Lido Cinemas.
“As mordant in its way as the slyly subversive movies Luis Buñuel made in Mexico, Brocka’s two-fisted melodrama is a hellish, compelling work by a director … called ‘the great filmmaker of the ’70s.’” – J. Hoberman, New York Times.
Bona is a stark tale of a selfless middle-class Manila schoolgirl (Nora Aunor) who develops a fierce, morbid attachment to a narcissistic movie extra and abandons everything to devote her life to serving the actor. No humiliation he heaps upon her deters in any way. Aunor’s performance transforms the story into a profound portrait of a woman who finally doesn’t take it anymore…
Out of sight for over forty years since it premiered at Cannes in 1981, the restoration premiered at Cannes Classics in 2024 and since then it has screened at the New York and Toronto Film Festivals.
Introduced by Russell Edwards at Ritz Cinemas and Chris Luscri at Lido Cinemas.
FILM NOTES
By Tony Rayns
Tony Rayns is a London-based critic, curator and occasional filmmaker.
Editor's note: this piece was published prior to the passing of Nora Aunor
LINO BROCKA
Lino Brocka (1939-1991)
was a great Filipino film and theatre director and political activist who
fought both bad government in the Philippines and the social irresponsibility
and low standards of technique and acting in the country’s film industry. Thanks
to screenings around the world – not least in Cannes – his best films were seen
as powerful and consequential. He made it impossible for cinephiles to ignore
Filipino cinema in the late 20th century.
He used to describe himself as a ‘country boy’, and overcame a turbulent provincial childhood to do well in high school and win a scholarship to the University of the Philippines in Manila. But he dropped out and became a (failed) trainee Mormon missionary in Hawaii for a couple of years, and then hung out in San Francisco for a few months. Eventually he returned to Manila, where he began working with PETA, the Philippine Educational Theater Association. An invitation to direct for a film company followed. Brocka continued working with PETA until his death and used many actors from the troupe in his films, including Bona.
To earn a living and, later, to support his political activities and friends, Brocka made plenty of star vehicles for the main commercial film companies during his prolific directing career. But these were never slapdash entertainments: he insisted on taking the escapist material seriously and getting credible work from his cast and crew. Whenever he could, though, he aimed higher. His major, ground-breaking “serious” films included Weighed but Found Wanting (Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang, 1974), 3, 2, 1 (1974), Manila: In the Claws of Light (Maynila, sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, 1975), Insiang(1976), Jaguar (1979), Bona (1980), Bayan Ko (This is My Country, 1984) and Orapronobis (Fight for Us, 1989). Brocka always insisted he had no ambition to ‘revolutionise’ Filipino cinema, only to help create ‘The Great Filipino Audience’ for grown-up films. And when asked what it meant to him to take his films to festivals abroad, he shrugged: ‘It helps open doors for other Filipino directors.’ He died in Quezon City in a crashed car on the night of 21/22 May 1991.
He used to describe himself as a ‘country boy’, and overcame a turbulent provincial childhood to do well in high school and win a scholarship to the University of the Philippines in Manila. But he dropped out and became a (failed) trainee Mormon missionary in Hawaii for a couple of years, and then hung out in San Francisco for a few months. Eventually he returned to Manila, where he began working with PETA, the Philippine Educational Theater Association. An invitation to direct for a film company followed. Brocka continued working with PETA until his death and used many actors from the troupe in his films, including Bona.
To earn a living and, later, to support his political activities and friends, Brocka made plenty of star vehicles for the main commercial film companies during his prolific directing career. But these were never slapdash entertainments: he insisted on taking the escapist material seriously and getting credible work from his cast and crew. Whenever he could, though, he aimed higher. His major, ground-breaking “serious” films included Weighed but Found Wanting (Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang, 1974), 3, 2, 1 (1974), Manila: In the Claws of Light (Maynila, sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, 1975), Insiang(1976), Jaguar (1979), Bona (1980), Bayan Ko (This is My Country, 1984) and Orapronobis (Fight for Us, 1989). Brocka always insisted he had no ambition to ‘revolutionise’ Filipino cinema, only to help create ‘The Great Filipino Audience’ for grown-up films. And when asked what it meant to him to take his films to festivals abroad, he shrugged: ‘It helps open doors for other Filipino directors.’ He died in Quezon City in a crashed car on the night of 21/22 May 1991.
THE FILM
All of Lino Brocka’s
best films have an impact and resonance that is universal, even if their points
of reference are specific to the Philippines. That’s certainly true of Bona,
although some foreign viewers may find the film’s central premise a little
strange. It’s easy to relate to the
story’s essence: it’s about the chasm between female expectations and male
expectations, a kind of sex-war drama. But the situation it describes is quite
specifically Filipino. The 18-year-old title character, Bona, comes from a
lower-middle-class family, in which she finds it impossible to conform with her
parents’ wishes and ambitions for her. Her solace is that she has a huge crush
on a movie actor, clipping his photos from the magazines into a scrapbook. But
he is not a movie star with a large entourage of fans; Gardo is stuck in minor
supporting roles, usually in action movies.
After a violent clash with her abusive father, Bona seeks refuge with Gardo in his shack in the slums of Tondo. She becomes his unpaid factotum: feeding him, washing his clothes, cleaning the shack, fetching water and even nursing him after a street brawl. Sex is not part of the deal, although Bona is visibly jealous and resentful whenever Gardo brings back young women for one-night stands or more. This curious, seemingly masochistic surrender to the needs of a macho man may seem hard to credit, but it’s not unusual in the Philippines. Bona is what is known locally as an “alaylay”. I’ll borrow the definition from Mario Hernando’s tribute book, Lino Brocka: the Arist and his Times (1993): ‘Aide who accompanies a star everywhere, helps him do personal chores and protects him from real or imagined harm.’ In this case, since he’s not a star, Gardo has only one alaylay: Bona. The one-sided emotional dynamic between the actor and his aide gives the film its core.
Bona is played by the singular Nora Aunor, who also produced the film through her company NV Productions. Her lengthy (and continuing) career defies synopsis – there’s an exhaustive account on Wikipedia. All you really need to know is that she came from an impoverished provincial family, won a string of radio singing competitions in her teens, and went on to a hugely acclaimed career as a recording artist, on TV, in movies and even in theatre – including, latterly, PETA productions. Most of her films are commercial melodramas, and Brocka had never taken her very seriously as an actress until he found himself directing her in two 1979 vehicles. Their off-screen discussions led to the making of Bona. Clearly ambitious to do good work, she opted many times to work with leading directors: aside from Brocka, they included Mario O’Hara, Ishmael Bernal, and more recently Brillante Mendoza and Adolfo Alix Jr. She was the Philippines’ first dark-skinned superstar, and is still adored as such by the masses.
Her co-star in Bona is Brocka’s protégé Phillip Salvador, star of many Brocka films, cast here specifically to raise his public profile. Brocka usually cast him in working-class roles, but he remains a versatile actor, equally capable of playing, say, a middle-class lawyer. In a 1984 review of Bona in The Village Voice, the late American critic Elliott Stein compared Brocka’s filming of Salvador’s body with Josef von Sternberg’s veneration of Marlene Dietrich – a barely coded way of insinuating that Brocka was gay – but the comparison is ludicrous. Brocka was never a visually ambitious director in the Sternberg vein. His default visual idiom was an unadorned realism, occasionally inflected with a noir-ish expressionism. His primary focus was always on his actors, often shown in close-up, and he worked tirelessly to draw psychological and emotional truths from them.
Because the alaylay is such a well-known phenomenon in the Philippines, Brocka felt no great need to ‘explain’ it in Bona. But he does choose to open the film with images of Bona in the crowds at one of Manila’s most fanatical Catholic ceremonies, the annual procession of the Black Nazarene. There is no suggestion that she is an especially pious young woman, but the frenzy of the masses around her on the streets provides a social context for her infatuation with Gardo. The underlying perception, intensified by the depiction of life in the Tondo squatter area, is that the country is mired in hopeless, insoluble problems: poverty, fanaticism, distorted human relationships, always with manipulative leadership and bad government in the background. The film dramatises a domestic crisis, but its implications spread like ripples in a muddy pond.
After a violent clash with her abusive father, Bona seeks refuge with Gardo in his shack in the slums of Tondo. She becomes his unpaid factotum: feeding him, washing his clothes, cleaning the shack, fetching water and even nursing him after a street brawl. Sex is not part of the deal, although Bona is visibly jealous and resentful whenever Gardo brings back young women for one-night stands or more. This curious, seemingly masochistic surrender to the needs of a macho man may seem hard to credit, but it’s not unusual in the Philippines. Bona is what is known locally as an “alaylay”. I’ll borrow the definition from Mario Hernando’s tribute book, Lino Brocka: the Arist and his Times (1993): ‘Aide who accompanies a star everywhere, helps him do personal chores and protects him from real or imagined harm.’ In this case, since he’s not a star, Gardo has only one alaylay: Bona. The one-sided emotional dynamic between the actor and his aide gives the film its core.
Bona is played by the singular Nora Aunor, who also produced the film through her company NV Productions. Her lengthy (and continuing) career defies synopsis – there’s an exhaustive account on Wikipedia. All you really need to know is that she came from an impoverished provincial family, won a string of radio singing competitions in her teens, and went on to a hugely acclaimed career as a recording artist, on TV, in movies and even in theatre – including, latterly, PETA productions. Most of her films are commercial melodramas, and Brocka had never taken her very seriously as an actress until he found himself directing her in two 1979 vehicles. Their off-screen discussions led to the making of Bona. Clearly ambitious to do good work, she opted many times to work with leading directors: aside from Brocka, they included Mario O’Hara, Ishmael Bernal, and more recently Brillante Mendoza and Adolfo Alix Jr. She was the Philippines’ first dark-skinned superstar, and is still adored as such by the masses.
Her co-star in Bona is Brocka’s protégé Phillip Salvador, star of many Brocka films, cast here specifically to raise his public profile. Brocka usually cast him in working-class roles, but he remains a versatile actor, equally capable of playing, say, a middle-class lawyer. In a 1984 review of Bona in The Village Voice, the late American critic Elliott Stein compared Brocka’s filming of Salvador’s body with Josef von Sternberg’s veneration of Marlene Dietrich – a barely coded way of insinuating that Brocka was gay – but the comparison is ludicrous. Brocka was never a visually ambitious director in the Sternberg vein. His default visual idiom was an unadorned realism, occasionally inflected with a noir-ish expressionism. His primary focus was always on his actors, often shown in close-up, and he worked tirelessly to draw psychological and emotional truths from them.
Because the alaylay is such a well-known phenomenon in the Philippines, Brocka felt no great need to ‘explain’ it in Bona. But he does choose to open the film with images of Bona in the crowds at one of Manila’s most fanatical Catholic ceremonies, the annual procession of the Black Nazarene. There is no suggestion that she is an especially pious young woman, but the frenzy of the masses around her on the streets provides a social context for her infatuation with Gardo. The underlying perception, intensified by the depiction of life in the Tondo squatter area, is that the country is mired in hopeless, insoluble problems: poverty, fanaticism, distorted human relationships, always with manipulative leadership and bad government in the background. The film dramatises a domestic crisis, but its implications spread like ripples in a muddy pond.
THE RESTORATION
Source: DCP Carlotta Films, France
In 2023, Carlotta Films and Kani Releasing acquired the rights to the film from its producer and actor, Nora Aunor. This rediscovery of Bona is made possible thanks to the work of Professor José B. Capino (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) who, as part of his research, interviewed the late Pierre Rissient, champion of Filipino cinema. During this 2017 interview, Rissient entrusted Capino with information on the location of the elements of several Lino Brocka films, including Bona. Concerned with their preservation and exhibition, Rissient had the original negatives deposited at the LTC Lab in Paris (now Cité de Mémoire). Capino shared this information with Kani Releasing and Carlotta Films and the restoration was done from the original 35mm image and sound negatives preserved by LTC Patrimoine. Sound restoration was carried out at L.E. DIAPASON. Special thanks also to Gil Quito, Victoria Belarmino and Jojo Devera.
Director: Lino Brocka; Production Company: NV Productions for the Metro Manila Film Festival 1980; Producer: Nora Villamayor; Script: Cenen Ramones; Photography: Conrado Baltazar; Editor: Augusto Salvador; Production Design: Joey Luna; Music: Max Jocson.
Cast: Nora Aunor (Bona), Philip Salvador (Gardo), Rustica Carpio (Bona’s father), Venchito Galvez (Bona’s mother), Spanky Manikan (Bona’s brother), Marissa Delgado (Katrina), Nanding Josef (Nilo).
Philippines | 1980 | 86 Mins | 4K DCP | Colour | Tagalog with English subtitles | UC 15+
In 2023, Carlotta Films and Kani Releasing acquired the rights to the film from its producer and actor, Nora Aunor. This rediscovery of Bona is made possible thanks to the work of Professor José B. Capino (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) who, as part of his research, interviewed the late Pierre Rissient, champion of Filipino cinema. During this 2017 interview, Rissient entrusted Capino with information on the location of the elements of several Lino Brocka films, including Bona. Concerned with their preservation and exhibition, Rissient had the original negatives deposited at the LTC Lab in Paris (now Cité de Mémoire). Capino shared this information with Kani Releasing and Carlotta Films and the restoration was done from the original 35mm image and sound negatives preserved by LTC Patrimoine. Sound restoration was carried out at L.E. DIAPASON. Special thanks also to Gil Quito, Victoria Belarmino and Jojo Devera.
Director: Lino Brocka; Production Company: NV Productions for the Metro Manila Film Festival 1980; Producer: Nora Villamayor; Script: Cenen Ramones; Photography: Conrado Baltazar; Editor: Augusto Salvador; Production Design: Joey Luna; Music: Max Jocson.
Cast: Nora Aunor (Bona), Philip Salvador (Gardo), Rustica Carpio (Bona’s father), Venchito Galvez (Bona’s mother), Spanky Manikan (Bona’s brother), Marissa Delgado (Katrina), Nanding Josef (Nilo).
Philippines | 1980 | 86 Mins | 4K DCP | Colour | Tagalog with English subtitles | UC 15+