Will Your Heart Beat Faster?

After repeatedly failing to smuggle drugs into the Philippines, yakuza soldier Onota (Bobby Garrovillo) slips a laced cassette tape into the pocket of a stranger on the plane: pop singer Johnny (Christopher de Leon). This singular deus ex machina sets the Yakuza, the Filipino-Chinese Triad, and a fake convent of nuns onto Johnny's tail. Determined to figure out why everyone is chasing him and his friends – bandmates Nonong (Jay Ilagan), Nancy (Sandy Andolong) and newfound love interest Melanie (Charo Santos) – the quartet dress up and go undercover. When the lunatics come together, a cartoonish rock opera ensues! 

Concerned that the audience might mistake the film’s nuns for real ones, Will Your Heart Beat Faster? begins with a disclaimer mandated by the Philippine Board of Censors: this musical farce is a work of fiction. But no disclaimer can dampen the shots fired here by Filipino master writer-director Mike De Leon (Kisapmata, Batch ’81) against Jesuit education; China and Japan’s tendency to meddle in Filipino affairs; and a myriad of other corrupt institutions that would become common targets of his acerbic cinematic critique. A master of various genres, this is Mike De Leon at his most outlandish and comedic!

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. This complete retrospective, the first ever presented in North America, brings together all of De Leon’s feature films and shorts as a writer and director. De Leon’s films are presented alongside some of the few surviving classic melodramas, musicals, costume dramas, and noir films of the 1930s–’60s to come out of the greatest of all Filipino studios, LVN Pictures, which was founded in 1938 by De Leon’s grandmother Doña Sisang. 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.