This screening will be preceded by an introduction by Patrick Flores, Deputy Director, National Gallery Singapore and Professor, University of the Philippines Department of Art Studies.
Director: Mike De Leon
Language: Filipino; English subtitles
Country: Philippines
Runtime: 103 min
Rating: PG13
Full Synopsis
Screenwriter Jose “Pete” Lacaba, the author of some of Lino Brocka’s best films, including Jaguar (1979), was jailed and tortured by the Marcos regime, a harrowing experience that drives this urgent tale of a nun’s awakening to political corruption and worker exploitation. A commercial failure, Sister Stella L. was nonetheless a sincere attempt at political cinema, made in the tumultuous and violent year leading to the overthrow of Marcos; in retrospect, De Leon observes, “The social order hardly changed after the revolt. All we did was get rid of a dictator and his family, and we didn’t even do it properly. The Marcoses should have stood trial and been thrown into jail. This didn’t happen because the revolt turned into a religious fiesta and was hailed as a peaceful revolution—the ultimate oxymoron.”
About the Speaker
Patrick Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines and concurrently Deputy Director at National Gallery Singapore. He is the Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008); Art After War: 1948-1969 (2015); and Raymundo Albano: Texts (2017). He was a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014. He was the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2019 and Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
This screening is part of Retrospective: Mike De Leon. For the full programme, please click here.
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