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“Insiang” is a landmark for Filipino cinema. It was the first film to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival, the first to be shot in the slums of Tondo, in Manila, while in 2015, Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation picked it for restoration, with the new version playing again in Cannes among a number of other festivals. Furthermore, Lamberto Antonio (occasionally mentioned as the Philippine Salvatore Quasimodo), one of the scriptwriters is considered one of the best Filipino poets, while Mario O’Hara, the other one, was also a successful director who directed a theater version of the film some years later (info courtesy of Khavn).

Poverty, misery, drunkenness, and gambling rule the shanty town of Tondo, where people barely make a living through mostly odd jobs. Insiang is one of the few exceptions of true beauty in this setting, although her life is by no means easier due to the fact.

If, within art cinema, there comes the instant gravitation to less the film than the name — the all-powerful auteur that supposedly doesn’t have to bow down to corporate masters — then even with a film as immediately striking as 1976’s Insiang, we begin with its author, Lino Brocka. Even in a life cut tragically short, he left enough of a mark to still be considered the Philippines’ greatest filmmaker, amongst his laurels being the nation’s first director to play in competition at Cannes. A particular association made with him was an outspoken criticism of the Philippines’ dictator-in-chief, Ferdinand Marcos.

But carrying that expectation over to Insiang, even without one mention of Marcos’ name throughout the film, the presence of both a fundamentally rotten authority and people left to fend for themselves in poverty leans a viewer, even the uninformed, towards assuming a greater institutional critique. Yet to quickly sum...