Screening times:
Friday, July 17 6:30 PM

Lino Brocka | Phillipines | 1988 | 136m
Tagalog with English subtitles

One of prolific Filipino director Lino Brocka's enduring successes, Macho Dancer blends socially conscious melodrama with pulp provocation. Upon losing a reliable American client, young gigolo Pol leaves his native province to try his luck in the soapy gay clubs of Manila. When Pol’s call-boy mentor Noel goes in search of his missing underage sister, the pair slip into a subculture full of drug lords and police corruption.

The film's frank depiction of homosexuality, prostitution, drag queens and crooked cops, the porn industry, sexual slavery and drugs and violence caused government officials to order extensive edits of the film. Brocka smuggled an uncensored cut out of the Philippines to be shown at a limited number of international film festivals where it received audience and critical acclaim. This uncensored print of the film is part of the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and was used to restore this 2026 version.

"A vividly told and hyper-stylized melodrama... He falls into a demimonde of desire and police corruption in this surprisingly explicit (but never exploitative) rediscovery." Christian Zilko IndieWire "Brocka builds scenes with incisive clarity, unfolding the intrepid maneuvers that make the difference between survival and disaster; the inevitable recourse to violence is tinged with a revolutionary defiance. Richard Brody The New Yorker"

"Lino Brocka's Macho Dancer exudes the raw vitality and power of Hector Babenco's Pixote and Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay! Like those films, it tells of young people struggling to survive in an urban jungle. It differs from them in Brocka's openly gay sensibility and in his ability to transform melodrama into romantic tragedy." Kevin Thomas The Los Angeles Times

Tickets $12 ($11.40 at the door if available)