Cinema
The Rites of May
Itim
Mike de Leon · 1976
Synopsis
During Holy Week, Jun, a young photographer, returns to his father, a paralysed doctor, in a small provincial town. There he meets Teresa, whose sister Rosa disappeared years earlier; as the Lenten processions pass by, strange images appear on his photographs, and a spiritist séance makes the missing girl speak, bringing back to light a past that Jun's family prefers to keep silent.
Context
The director had produced and photographed Lino Brocka's film about the Manila underworld the year before, under the banner of the company he had just set up, which also produced this one. The screenplay is by Clodualdo del Mundo Jr. and Gil Quito. Charo Santos, whom Brocka had made audition, made her debut in it; Mario Montenegro, star of the family studio in the days of the costume films, played the doctor. Its author later presented it, with self-mockery, as a ghost story by a debutant from a rich family, and sees in it his fear of the dark side of a culture marked by superstitions inherited from the colonial period.
Who it is for
One hundred and seven minutes in Filipino. The unease comes from the light and the sound rather than from the apparitions: nothing like the formulaic horror the country was producing at the time.
Prizes and reception
Voted best film of the decade by the Gawad Urian critics in 1981; acting prize for Charo Santos at the 1978 Asian Film Festival.