Batch '81

Complementing Kispmata’s horrific vision of a ruling, paternalistic family despot, Mike De Leon’s Batch '81 expands its critique to include tomorrow’s tyrants. Freshman Sid Lucero (Mark Gil, in his breakout performance) desperately wants to join the Alpha Kappa Omega fraternity. Over the course of a gruelling initiation process, he goes through every humiliation to please his “masters”—even as their treatment veers into increasingly fascistic, cult-like territory.

Overt echoes of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and John Carpenter abound in De Leon’s claustrophobic college drama: a film that subverts expectation by casting college life in a sinister blood-red light. An urgent reaction to Ferdinand Marcos’ rule through Martial Law at the time, Batch ’81 burns bright today as De Leon’s angriest and most direct film—asking hard questions about masculinity, indoctrination, free will and the banality of evil, most insidious when disguised as brotherhood, responsibility or duty. Raising uncomfortable truths about class aspirations and privilege in the Philippines—and the world at large—Batch ’81 is as timely and necessary as it has ever been, presented in its 4K restoration commissioned by the Asian Film Archive and L'Immagine Ritrovata.