Bona

Synopsis

Director Lino Brocka brings his trademark blend of melodrama and social realism to this lost-and-found masterwork of Filipino cinema, a troubling character study at the intersection of fandom, sexuality, and martyrdom. Superstar Nora Aunor—who produced the film, subverting her own fame—plays Bona, a middle-class girl from the Philippines who is obsessed with Gardo (Philip Salvador), a bit actor in low-budget films. When she decides to drop out of school to follow the object of her infatuation, her furious father casts her out and Bona moves in with her idol in the Manila slums. At first delighted to play house, the young woman soon finds herself not the wife, but the maid—at the mercy of Gardo’s every whim and desire, yet intent on enduring his unending parade of conquests in the hopes of finally being seen.