Tuesday, December 10, 2019 | 10 AM – 12 PM
UP Film Institute
Ylanan Avenue, College of Mass Communication Complex, UP Diliman, 1101 Quezon City, Philippines
Free public lecture
Guest lecturer for the Pelikula Lektura December installment is none other than multi-awarded screenwriter, filmmaker, playwright, writer, editor, and the newly conferred 2019 Gawad Plaridel awardee, Mr. Bonifacio P. Ilagan.
This month’s lektura will happen on December 10, 2019 (Tuesday), 10 AM–12 NN at the Videotheque, UPFI Film Center, UP Diliman. (Visit on gmaps: https://goo.gl/maps/BpyRBZ8wSTtwqp4f6).
Mr. Boni Ilagan will be delivering a lecture entitled “Pursuing Human Rights: Film and Dissent.”
Admission is FREE and open to the public.
For interested participants, you may register at
www.tinyurl.com/PelikulaLekturaBI
LECTURE TITLE
Pursuing Human Rights: Film and Dissent
ABSTRACT
Human rights are under siege in the Philippines like no time other than the Marcos dictatorship.
To pursue human rights is to dissent; there is no other way. But dissent against what, and why?
Initiated into the world of the sinehan and shuting as a young boy, the author shares his thoughts as a dissident filmmaker against human wrongs.
BIO
All through his college years up to his “senior moments” today, BONIFACIO P. ILAGAN has been working in the alternative and traditional mass media, including television and video/film, apart from the theater from where it all got started. He has been recognized in all these media platforms, as attested to by his body of works and awards from the Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Catholic Mass Media Awards, Film Academy of the Philippines, Philippine Movie Press Club Star Awards, Gawad Tanglaw, Golden Screen Awards, and the Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences; and of late, Gawad Plaridel.
In 1999, he was among the 100 awardees of the CCP Centennial Honors for the Arts, chosen from among “the most outstanding Filipino artists and cultural advocates in the last 100 years for their contribution to the development of the nation through cultural work and the arts.” In 2010, he was conferred the Lifetime Achievement Award (Gawad Balagtas) by the Writers Union of the Philippines.
Forty years ago, Ilagan was a political science freshman in the UP College of Arts and Sciences. Driven by his love for the theater (and for want to be exempted from paying the tuition fee), he auditioned and was accepted in the UP Mobile Theater of Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero, who would eventually become a National Artist. In plazas and basketball courts in Manila, the suburbs, and the provinces, Ilagan acted in Prof. Guerrero’s plays.
After three semesters, Ilagan bade goodbye to the UP Mobile Theater to found Panday-Sining, an activist theater group that performed in the fashion of the UP Mobile Theater, but with a big activist difference: In its plays which Ilagan himself wrote, the masa and their plight and aspirations took centerstage.
When President Marcos declared martial law in 1972, Ilagan was already in the underground movement in the staff of its clandestine press. In 1974, he was captured with the journalist-poet Jose F. Lacaba and UP English professor Dolores Stephens Feria. He was tortured.
Upon his release in 1976, he worked as a reporter for a television magazine, and as executive editor of another cultural magazine. It was in the now-defunct Radio Philippines Network (RPN 9), however, where he stayed the longest, working as writer and director mostly of public affairs programs starting in the late 1970s up to the late 1980s.
Learning that his name was back in some military wanted list, he left RPN 9, rejoined the underground, but was rearrested and tortured again in 1994.
Upon his release, he wrote and directed the pioneering documentary on Philippine history and the people’s movement, “Sa Liyab ng Libong Sulo” (1995).
He returned to RPN 9 and later accepted assignments in IBC 13, and in GMA 7 and ABS-CBN.
Among his important works in television under the pen name Patrick Manahan were the unprecedented and award-winning series “Alab ng Lahi” (1982-84, various directors), a docudrama on the lives and struggles of personages in Philippine history; and another series called “Bisperas ng Kasaysayan” (1995, Lupita Aquino Kashiwahara, director) that revolved around a fictional hacendero family torn by the revolutionary movement in the 1890s.
A memorable show that he helped organize and produce was “Nora Mismo,” a public service program hosted by Nora Aunor. Another project he wrote for was the drama series “Boracay” which could be the precursor of today’s telenovela format.
Ilagan wrote and directed many documentaries whose social themes were recurrent in his works. One such work, “VFA: A Question of Nationhood,” a documentary on the RP-US relations, was, for some reason, never shown to the public. It was produced by the Philippine Information Agency.
He wrote screenplays starting in the late 1980s, including “The Flor Contemplacion Story” (with Ricky Lee, 1994), followed by “Dukot” (2009), “Sigwa” (2010), “Deadline” (2011), and “Migrante” (2012). These films, all directed by Joel Lamangan, are cited social-realist films on human rights, justice and freedom, and social reformation.
Ilagan is the recipient of the 2019 Gawad Plaridel Award, given by the University of the Philippines System to outstanding media practitioners. Named after the great Marcelo H. del Pilar, Gawad Plaridel bestows honor on Filipino media practitioners who have excelled in any of the media and performed with the highest level of professional integrity in the interest of public service.
The Pelikula Lektura: UPFI Philippine Cinema Centennial Lecture Series aims to highlight key historical events and phenomena in Philippine cinema in the last 100 years and reflect upon what history can teach us for the next 100 years of our journey.
