Steven de Castro, Philippines, 2017, 120 min
Revolution Selfe expands the horizons of documentary storytelling while broadening our understanding about the lesser-known fronts in the global “War on Terror.” Filmmaker Steven De Castro paints a portrait of a 48 year-old Maoist guerilla army in the Philippine hinterlands known as the New People’s Army. But rather than simply presenting interviews and images in a traditional journalistic manner, this flm weaves fantasy elements and web-based camera techniques into the documentary form to disrupt our entire matrix of widely held beliefs underpinning the discussion of terrorism, poverty, and the motivations of the warriors who fght in a peasant revolution. The flm is narrated and shot almost entirely from frstperson point of view, using a small GoPro action camera that the flmmaker is wearing.