Filmmaker taps into Imelda's power

Filmmaker taps into Imelda's power

Ong Sor Fern, ANN/The Straits Times/Singapore

--------------------------------------------------------------- Ramona Diaz's documentary on Imelda Marcos has received an award at the Sundance Festival, divisive responses from Filipinos and a lawsuit from the former first lady herself. ----------------------------------------------------------------

Filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz spent a month trailing Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, with a camera crew in 1998.

The result is a telling portrait of megalomania which won Diaz a nomination for the coveted Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January this year. Imelda also won the Best Cinematography Award.

For the genial 42-year-old filmmaker, Imelda is the culmination of more than five years of research and work. The project began with a chance encounter with Imelda Marcos.

Over the telephone from Baltimore in the United States where she is based, Diaz says that she first interviewed her for her first feature project, Spirits Rising, in 1993.

That documentary looked at the role played by middle-class Filipino women in the People Power uprising which unseated President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

"I just thought she's a big historical figure. For better or for worse, she's the best known Filipino in the world," says Diaz.

After the interview, Diaz asked the first lady if she would consent to being the subject of a film. She agreed. But it took Diaz a while to raise funding for the feature.

"I first approached her with the idea in 1993 and we had the first pre-production interview in 1996. The bulk of the film was shot in 1998, when we followed Mrs Marcos to her hometown of Tacloban," Diaz recalls.

"To her credit, she honored her agreement even after all that time."

For the filmmaker, the project was a chance to try to explore the person behind the persona.

"I wanted her to defend herself. Everything we brought up I wanted her to be able to address. Which is what I told her when I pitched the film. It's not a valentine to her but it will be fair.

"It's not a hit-and-run piece. I truly, truly believe it was fair."

The amount of time she spent with Imelda explains how she managed to get her famous subject to talk about everything -- from the assassination of opposition leader Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino to the imposition of martial law in the Philippines.

But while she may have cooperated with lengthy interviews during the shoot, she also later tried to have the movie banned.

In June, when the movie was scheduled for a theatrical release in the Philippines, she served papers on the film's distributor, Unitel.

She testified, weeping, in court that the movie made her out to be a "cheap flirt" and an "airhead, like a frivolous, wanton, extravagant woman at the expense of the poor".

Diaz, who had to return to the Philippines to testify at the trial, says that the suit came from out of the blue. "I was really surprised," she says.

Imelda gained a temporary injunction, which was overturned 20 days later.

Once released, Imelda stampeded past Hollywood blockbusters like Spider-Man 2 and I, Robot in its opening weekend.

It has since grossed over 14 million pesos (USS$423,770) at the box office. It is the only documentary to be released theatrically in the Philippines.

While Imelda Marcos herself has become a figure of ridicule in the Filipino press, she still touches a raw nerve with the Filipino people, many of whom either adore her passionately or loathe her with a vengeance.

As expected, her film has earned deeply divisive responses from Filipinos who have seen it.

"They either say, 'You make her look so good', or 'You made her look so bad'. They love it or they hate it. There is no in- between," says Diaz:

Making the film has made her appreciate the complexities of the woman who once wielded so much power as the wife of the Philippines' strongman.

"She's funny. She has a sense of humor which surprised me," the filmmaker says.

"People take issue when I say she's funny. But she can be funny and still be held accountable for the things she did."

Diaz grew up in the Philippines under martial law, and left the country when she was 17 to pursue a degree in film and photography at Boston's Emerson College.

She gained work experience in television after graduating, including a five-year stint on the hit 1980s television series, Remington Steele.

Film-making was something she had wanted to do for as long as she could remember, she says. She is married to a half-Chinese, half-Nepalese professor who teaches communications. "He has the adult job," she says with a laugh.

Although she spends most of her time in the U.S., where her seven-year-old daughter is growing up, she has returned to the Philippines occasionally to live and work. The longest stay was after her stint on Remington Steele in the 1980s.

"It was just after the Marcos regime had fallen. People were so hopeful," she recalls wistfully.

"I went back to the Philippines thinking I was going to live there for a few months. I ended up staying four years."

But she packed her bags once more to take on a postgraduate documentary filmmaking course at Stanford University.

Spirits Rising, which led her to that momentous meeting with Imelda Marcos, was made as part of her master's thesis.

After spending so much time with the iron butterfly, she admits that her views of Imelda have changed.

"I thought she was crazy, going into the project. But she's much smarter than she lets on. She could not have gotten that far without really being aware of politics and the games that people play. She's very good at that," she says.

"It's been said that she's a product of the president. I no longer believe that. From the very beginning, she was a very empowered woman. If she had not met the president at that age, she would have become something in her own right.

"She understands power intuitively. Her power at that age was her beauty and she knew it."