Manila: In the Claws of Darkness

Gripped in the film's subtitular 'claws of darkness', country-boy Julio seeks his lost village sweetheart, lured to the big city by a procuress. Slitting the underbelly of Manila (Brocka's true protagonist), he moves through shanty towns, street markets, building sites, brothels, and cheap Chinese cafés, all throbbing with poisonous life: the sin and cynicism of poverty under President Marcos' regime, captured with a raw immediacy against which the golden, sun-splashed flashbacks of pastoral romance seem like the flimsiest of painted veils.