Co-curated by renowned Filipino filmmaker and scholar Nick Deocampo and M+, this programme grapples with the paradox of the body as both agent and object of desire on screen. The ground of individual identity, the body is also inevitably fragmented and objectified by the camera. Deocampo’s Oliver (1983) documents the life of a gay female impersonator who stages a provocative performance of bondage and escape. In Roxlee’s Juan Gapang (1987), a man covered in white paint crawls through a Manila bustling but alien and devoid of compassion. Victoria Donato’s Hubog (1989) stages the female body’s invitation and resistance of the erotic male gaze in a delirious montage of found footage and Catholic iconography.

This presentation draws from Deocampo’s forthcoming essay ‘Cartography of the Body in Oliver’, in which he reflects on the semiotics of the body in his own film from four decades ago.