ProBernal AntiBio is the best Filipino film book of the year, maybe of all time
I got my copy from Butch Perez at lunchtime, opened to page 1, and did not stop reading until I finished the whole book. So no work was done today, and it was a day very well spent.
Intelligent, wicked, sometimes vicious (Bernal did not spare anyone, especially himself), this anti-biography is presented as a wide-ranging conversation between filmmaker Ishmael Bernal and his closest friend, the scholar and screenwriter Jorge Arago. Mercifully many of Bernal’s targets are long-dead, because he murders them.
Arago started the project in the 1990s by asking Bernal to keep a journal. After Arago died several years ago, their friend Angela Stuart-Santiago took on the project, and the result is awesome.
Think of it as Truffaut/Hitchcock, except that Truffaut/Hitchcock doesn’t make food shoot out of your nose. And a bit of the Warhol diaries. I had to stop reading several times to recover my breath. (And I have a tiny cameo in the book! Proof that I read every word.)
Read Bernal’s summation of the Philippine film industry and ask yourself if things have changed.
The book comes in an elegant square format which allows colleagues and interlocutors to comment on the conversation. Pro-Bernal Anti-Bio isn’t in stores yet, but you can order copies (PHP900 each) by emailing bernalbynight@gmail.com.