Just as its intro's slaughterhouse apparatus violently destroys pigs, so too does the crushing poverty of the Philippines—specifically, the countryside slums of Tondo—crush the titular heroine of Lino Brocka's 1976 Insiang, a woman trapped in an environment of destitution and abuse against which she can only struggle violently, and vainly. The first Philippine film ever presented at Cannes, Brocka's portrait of familial treachery and societal abandonment (written by Lamberto E. Antonio, based on a TV script by Mario O'Hara) channels its Sirk/Fassbinder melodrama through the filter of neorealism, its story's heightened emotions kept at a simmer by an aesthetic at once verité-blunt and yet shrewdly, meticulously composed. Nowhere is the director's command more understated and potent than during a sequence in which tender melancholy music is used to link Insiang (Hilda Koronel) and boyfriend Bebot's (Rez Cortez) lovemaking to her next-morning discovery that he's absconded, the underlying connotation being that Insiang's desperate idealism and subsequent disillusionment are two sides of the same coin.  Nick Schager