[Edits below.]
Many thanks to Geologic, AKA Prometheus Brown for the recent swap: a DVD of Marlon Fuentes’s Bontoc Eulogy for a copy of Poeta en San Francisco. I must say that I enjoy the gift economy.
I’d watched this film numerous times, for a couple of undergrad Ethnic Studies courses at UC Berkeley, and at the PFA back in 1996. Perhaps there was one more viewing in there, also in the mid-1990′s, for I recall Fuentes coming and speaking, either for a Filipino American student org, or at the invitation of Oscar Campomanes, who was one of our very few Filipino American professors at UCB at the time.
I recall having a few conversations with various community members about Bontoc Eulogy. There was apparent confusion about this film, which many perceived as a non-fiction documentary, in which the film’s protagonist was believed to be the filmmaker Fuentes himself. Fuentes acted the part of the on screen narrator, the “I,” though surely this is not uncommon, the filmmaker also taking on an acting role in his own films.