Bomba Bernal

Found footage from Philippine cinema’s sex-orientated bomba genre is accompanied with an AI-created voiceover by the late Ishmael Bernal – one of the best late-20th century Filipino filmmakers – narrating sharp, humorous, and satirical essays on the subject.

When IFFR favourite Khavn talked about Bomba Bernal for the first time, it sounded like a variation of National Anarchist (2023), that is, a portrait of a major Filipino director painted solely with materials from selected moments from his films. Well, if it was ever supposed to be like that then it turned out quite differently, as the film is more about Bomba than about master auteur Ishmael Bernal.

Bombas were the Philippine’s contribution to the 70s and 80s world wide wave of sex movies. While being eminently exportable, their main importance lies back home: as a reanimator of a film industry in deadly decline, but also as a genre with an ambiguous role during the Martial Law decades under Marcos. Bombas were a valve through which some of the dictatorship’s pressures got released – but it was also a locus of resistance, a space where political oppression was articulated through genre tropes. Bernal talked about these things with concern and irony in writing. Khavn found the images of these words.

– Olaf Möller

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