Heart on Fire, Brain on Ice: Philippine Nonfiction since 2000

Direct and political in their aims, these documentaries, features and shorts mostly unreleased and unseen in the United States, take a clear-eyed view of the Philippines’ most exploited—landless peasant farmers, urban poor displaced by development, generations of indigenous families affected by toxic waste left behind by U.S. military bases—as well as those among them who are agitated to resist. The filmmakers are often intimately if not directly affected by the repression they capture, and the films are made by and with activists who have integrated with the communities they follow on the ground. Occasionally surreal, sometimes absurd, these films maintain a firm grip on the visceral reality that binds their struggles together.