TWO BY MIKE DE LEON: BATCH '81

Opens February 6 | Freshman Sid Lucero (Mark Gil, in his breakout performance), desperately wants to join the Alpha Kappa Omega fraternity. Over the course of a gruelling initiation process, he goes through every humiliation to please his “masters” — even as their treatment veers into increasingly fascistic, cult-like territory. Overt echoes of Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and John Carpenter abound in de Leon’s claustrophobic college drama: a film that subverts expectations by casting college life in a sinister blood-red light. An urgent reaction to Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law rule at the time, BATCH ’81 burns bright today as de Leon’s angriest and most direct film — asking hard questions about masculinity, indoctrination, free will and the banality of evil, most insidious when disguised as brotherhood, responsibility or duty. Raising uncomfortable truths about class aspirations and privilege in the Philippines — and the world at large — BATCH ’81 is as timely and necessary as it has ever been, presented in its 4K restoration commissioned by the Asian Film Archive and L'Immagine Ritrovata.

Awards & Nominations

1982 Cannes Directors' Fortnight Official Selection

TWO by MIKE DE LEON | February 6–17

In 1982, renowned Filipino director, producer, and cinematographer Mike De Leon was in the enviable position of having two films in the Director's Fortnight competition at Cannes in the same year. Like much of his work from the 1970s and 80s both films, BATCH '81 and KISAPMATA, deal in themes of brutality and control. Unabashed metaphors for the Marcos dictatorship's violence on the body and the psyche of the Filipino people, both films faced censorship upon their release and have since been restored to their original versions.

In addition to being consistently political, De Leon’s filmography is also exceptionally diverse in genre. De Leon’s grandmother Narcisa “Sisang” De Leon founded  one of the first major Filipino studios, LVN Pictures. Growing up observing the comings-and-goings of the first Golden Age of Philippine cinema in the fifties and sixties, De Leon would go on to usher in the Second Golden Age in the seventies and eighties alongside peers such as Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal and Marilou Diaz-Abaya. In 1975, De Leon produced and shot Brocka’s groundbreaking MANILIA IN THE CLAWS OF LIGHT before his own debut the following year with supernatural horror film ITIM, which launched both his career and that of actor Charo Santos. 

Related Event: KISAPMATA (IN THE WINK OF AN EYE) - February 14–17

The Film Center is ADA accessible. This presentation will be projected without open captions. The theater is hearing-loop equipped. For accessibility requests, please email filmcenter@saic.edu