Rare docu on Philippines featured in Ciné Europa 13

Laughing Star, a documentary on the Philippines covering the revolution against Spain up to the fall of dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, is one of the featured films in the ongoing European film festival in Manila. Film director Werner Schroeter, vanguard of the 1970s-era New German Cinema, made the film which was shown quietly in the Philippines in 1988 but did not attract much media attention. The full-length documentary is the product of historical research, as well as tedious consultations with Philippine cultural figures including Virginia Moreno and director Ishmael Bernal, done by Schroeter in 1984. Schroeter, who was also a theater and television director, had expressed the wish to visit Manila again after filming Laughing Star but he never made the trip. He died last April 12 in Germany after an operation for cancer, which he battled for three years. He was 65. “To fulfill his wish of visiting the Philippines again, Schroeter’s producer for the ‘Laughing Star’ and close friend – Austrian Peter Kern – is expected to arrive in the Philippines from Vienna tonight," Goethe-Institut Director Richard Kunzel said in a telephone interview last Sept. 8. “As a tribute to Schroeter, 'Laughing Star’ will be shown on Sept. 15, 8:30 p.m. at the Alliance Francaise in Makati, with Kern as a special guest together with poetess Virginia Moreno, a close friend of Schroeter," Kunzel said. “Mr. Kern is visiting the Philippines for the Ciné Europa 13 Festival in order to fulfill Mr. Schroeter’s wish to come back to the Philippines, which he never was able to do. Mr. Kern is bringing the ‘Laughing Star’ with him and thanks to him, we shall be able to see this precious film," Kunzel said. Except for Laughing Star, the films included in Ciné Europa 13 are all showing at the Shangri-La Plaza Mall. MIFF visitor Although virtually unknown in the Philippines, Schroeter is recognized in Europe as “German cinema’s greatest marginal film-maker" because of his thought-provoking works. His films depict gays, immigrants, and other marginalized people set in various locales including the Philippines, Mexico, Lebanon, France, Italy, and Portugal. In 1983, the celebrated director visited the Philippines to attend the Manila International Film Festival, where he met experts from the UP Film Center and friends from the local movie industry. During his brief stay, the avant-garde director began making plans for a full-length film about the Philippines. By the time he returned to Germany, Schroeter had accumulated enough footage for a 12-minute documentary on the Philippines, which was aired by German television stations. ‘Mad genius of German cinema’ Schroeter’s contemporaries in the German cinema of the 1970s include Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders. He was born on April 7, 1945 in Thuringia in central Germany. He studied psychology briefly at the University of Mannheim and logged in several weeks at the Film and Television School in Munich before dropping out. In the 1960s, Schroeter started his career in “underground cinema" and constantly worked with Rosa von Praunheim, another gay director and a close friend. In 1967, Schroeter began working on experimental 8-millimeter films, his imagination fueled by the New York Underground Movement. Based on his works, it would appear that Schroeter took an intense imaginative liking to opera singer Maria Callas, who was his frequent subject. Schroeter’s film 'The Death of Maria Malibran' in 1971 earned him the label “the mad genius of German cinema," with French philosopher Michel Foucault writing about the film: “What Schroeter does with a face, a cheekbone, the lips, the expression of the eyes, is a multiplying and burgeoning of the body, an exultation." He won the Golden Bear top prize in the 1980 Berlin Film Festival, the first German to be so honored, for his work “Palermo or Wolfsburg." The film tackled the difficulties of a Sicilian guest worker and his unsuccessful bid to integrate into German society. Last February, the Berlin Film Festival awarded Schroeter an honorary Teddy Award for cinema with gay themes to commemorate his lifetime achievement in cinema. – YA, GMANews.TV