Signed: Lino Brocka

Documentaries about film-makers are generally a major snooze, but Lino Brocka (arch-foe of Imelda Marcos, best known for his Manila: In the Claws of Darkness) tells tales that could cure deafness. Blackwood has the good sense to simply let him rip, and he ranges freely over his extraordinary life story, his attachment to the city's slum-dwellers, his struggle to make movies of adult interest, and his troubles with successive Filipino governments. Most movingly, Brocka comes out as gay, presents clips from his first gay-themed film (the long-lost Gold-Plated), and shows rehearsals for his upcoming film about a rent boy, Macho Dancer. The combustible mixture of sex, radicalism and soap generates more heat than many a fiction film.