Bomba Bernal | Khavn de la Cruz | 2025
Paraphrasing French philosopher Henri Bergson, things are never defined by their primitive form, but by the tendency hidden within that form. That could be the premise of the latest film by Khavn de la Cruz, a consistently provocative and maniacally productive exponent of Filipino avant-garde cinema. Bomba Bernal is a sarcastic, often uncompromising look at the bomba genre—a wave of lowbrow Filipino erotic films that experienced its heyday from the late 1960s to the 1980s—yet at the same time it summons its ghosts to reveal, in its deteriorating hints of a potential social liberation, a distinctive charm.
The film consists entirely of clips taken from bomba films, sutured together through Furan Guillermo’s brisk, collage-like editing and sound design based on cheap-sounding local appropriations of popular music mainstays—including Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s “Je t’aime…moi non plus,” Ary Barroso’s “Aquarela do Brasil,” and an amusing karaoke reinterpretation of The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” in Filipino, written and performed by Khavn himself. This style corresponds to the source films’ very function and ethos: quickly and cheaply produced, interchangeable, and oriented toward maximum sensation, titillation, and bluntness for the spectator (as Bomba Bernal shows by highlighting the function of particularly bizarre, over-obvious erotic euphemisms). The physical patina of the footage, amplified by marks of aging and repeated conversions between film, video, and digital, adds to the sense of scarcity at the levels of production, distribution, and archiving, yet also to the films’ strange persistence in spite of all. The use of artificial intelligence for dubbing the voiceovers, while inevitably divisive, can be seen as a byproduct of the wretched status of bomba films: endlessly replaceable, endlessly circulating.
The conceptual framework of the film is formed by the thoughts of Ishmael Bernal (1938–1996), an iconic Filipino auteur as well as a critic, whose reflections on the bomba genre were recently compiled in a book titled, obviously enough, Bomba (Everything’s Fine Press, 2022). The AI voiceover, replicating Bernal’s thoughts, constantly punctures the soundtrack with witty one-liners about the films’ “unmitigated corn and unmitigated nonsense,” their disrespect for the audience’s intelligence (“the director presuming that the audience is blind and has an IQ of 46”), and, above all, the way they provided escapism during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (a regime that somehow tolerated the bomba genre despite the professed Catholicism of its official ideology). And yet, Bernal still discerned a certain value in the phenomenon, seeing the films’ artistic deficiencies as symptomatic of the entire Filipino movie industry, once remarking that “between films that don’t elevate my mind, I might as well see the one that’s sexy.” There is a touch of admiration in how these films skirted rigid censorship and notions of morality and good taste. If only the voracious sexuality in bomba films—sometimes lightly arousing, sometimes unintentionally funny, at other times dark and disturbing, especially in moments of sadism toward women—led to true emancipation, one that is both sexual and social.
One of the film’s four chapters centers on an interview with a fictional bomba star actress. Divas such as Rossana Ortiz, Pepsi Paloma, and Stella Strada were major selling points of the genre, and they have earned a place in Filipino collective memory. The film’s take on the female star phenomenon is, again, double-edged. One can’t help but laugh at the fictional diva’s tortured attempts to justify the artistic value of bomba films (“85% is sex, the rest is pure drama”), yet the images of star performance smuggled from the films by Khavn and Guillermo possess a certain tenderness—a tenderness resonant with found-footage works preoccupied with the fleeting yet enduring appeal of female stardom (Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart, Peter Delpeut’s Diva Dolorosa, Cecilia Barriga’s Meeting of Two Queens).
It is no bomba-like exaggeration to say that Bomba Bernal is one of this year’s most intriguing films. The way it balances sardonic commentary with respect for the genre’s potential continues what found footage often does best: exploring how familiar forms can be carved open to unleash energies that produce novel ways of thinking and creating. Although Khavn’s film is firmly anchored in the Filipino context, its appeal extends well beyond Filipino or Latin American cinema aficionados. The moment I recognized a scene from Vampire Hookers—a film that, curiously enough, is screening at the 2025 Festival otrlého diváka (Shockproof Film Festival) in Prague, Czech Republic—I once again realized that the intersections of found footage and exploitation deserve to be investigated transnationally and transculturally.