MMFF

The Metro Manila Film Festival. The country’s largest annual film event, held over the Christmas season, during which foreign films are kept off Philippine screens so that local films have the run of them.

Its predecessor, the Metropolitan Film Festival, opened on 21 September 1975, created to commemorate the third anniversary of martial law and the President’s New Society programme. It was renamed in 1977. The biggest thing in the Philippine film calendar began as a martial law anniversary event.

That origin is not a gotcha. It is the reason the festival is shaped the way it is: a state-adjacent body, an annual window of protected screens, and a set of commercial expectations that an all-independent slate could not meet when one was tried. Lessons 3.6 and 3.7 handle what happened when it was.

Source: Metro Manila Film Festival, Wikipedia and 1975 Metro Manila Film Festival, Wikipedia for the founding date and the commemorative purpose, in that wording. VERA Files has reported on the festival’s funds and its martial-law origins directly, free, under the title “The Metro Manila Film Festival: As Martial Law corpse”.

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