ECP

The Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, created on 29 January 1982 by Executive Order 770 with Imee Marcos as Director General, under the Ministry of Tourism.

Its mandate was unusually broad: run an international film festival, operate the Manila Film Center, administer a rating and classification system, establish a national film archive, and finance production through a film fund. It released six films theatrically between 1982 and 1985, including Himala and Oro, Plata, Mata.

It was also later accused of producing sex-oriented films, which is the sharpest irony of the era. The regime that would not let Brocka show a slum ran a film body that went around its own censors on sex. The ECP ceased operations in 1985 and its institutional lineage runs forward into the film agency the industry deals with today.

Source: Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, Wikipedia for the executive order, the mandate, the slate and the dissolution. Note that the same page attributes the dissolution to the Corazon Aquino administration, which is chronologically impossible given the 1985 date of EO 1051; this course treats the Marcos-era dissolution as correct and flags the error. The best free first-hand account is Joel David’s “Experimental Cinema of the Philippines: A Hasty Recollection”.

First used in: 3.4 · The golden age a dictatorship paid for