Kisapmata

One Sunday in November, Mila (Charo Santos) announces to her father Dadang (Vic Silayan), a retired police officer, that she is pregnant, asking for permission to marry her co-worker Noel (Jay Ilangan). The noose further tightens as Dadong's unreasonable expectations for a dowry are not met and he exhibits an increasingly authoritarian streak. The couple marries and soon, Mila's father begins a game of exclusion and manipulation in the hopes of reasserting control over his kin.

Based on the true crime reportage "The House on Zapote Street" penned by Nick Joaquin, Mike De Leon's Kisapmata, beautifully restored in 4K by L'Immagine Ritrovata, is a stunning example of psychological horror; a film that meticulously tighten the noose around its characters' neck until the outcome feels inevitable — culminating in a brutal, unflinching portrait of the horrors of patriarchy at its most pathological. Voted the 3rd Best Filipino Film Of All Time by the Pinoy Rebyu (SFFR), it stands as one of Mike De Leon's most unsettling and politically resonant films.

Mike De Leon, the producer and cinematographer of Lino Brocka’s haunting masterpiece Manila in the Claws of Light (1975), is one of Filipino cinema’s most fiercely political and dramatic storytellers in his own right. Inspired by this storied history of popular moviemaking in the Philippines—one he experienced firsthand as a child on the LVN studio lot—as well as by Hollywood and European cinema, De Leon’s own films mix the genres of melodrama, crime, supernatural horror, slapstick comedy, and the musical with blisteringly critical stances toward his country’s history of corruption and cronyism, state-sponsored violence, feudalist exploitation, and populist machismo: the festering legacies of the nation’s colonial past made even more purulent by the dictatorships of Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte.