Oliver is a searing portrait of an intrepid performer negotiating the poverty and oppression that many marginalised people in the Philippines faced during the country’s period of martial law between 1972 and 1986. Oliver is a female impersonator who supports his family by channelling Liza Minnelli and Grace Jones in exuberant shows at Manila’s gay bars and engaging in occasional sex work. In the film’s final act, Oliver performs his legendary Spiderman routine. On the dance floor, he spins a giant web by pulling thread from his anus. It is a radical and audacious performance undertaken at the height of the military dictatorship. 

Shot from an autoethnographic perspective, Revolutions Happen Like Refrains in a Song is a chronicle of the filmmaker’s experiences that intersect with contemporary history. Combining Super-8 home movies, personal photographs, and archival footage from his earlier works, Deocampo revisits his own childhood during the Martial Law. The film documents Filipino life caught in the throes of poverty, prostitution, and revolutionary change, including Deocampo’s personal account of the People Power Revolution that toppled President Ferdinand Marcos’s regime in 1986.