After being down with COVID-19, Nick Deocampo rises up with films in prestigious Cinematheque in France

Film scholar, teacher, author, director and documentarist Nick Deocampo has a lot of things to give thanks for these days.

After he was discharged from a hospital for DOVID-19, he was surprised and overjoyed to learn that a select choice of his documentary films were recently shown in the prestigious Cinematheque Francias in France specifically at the Salle Jean Epstein under the Cinema D’Avantgrade Programmation Reguliere section.

It was indeed pride and achievement for a Filipino film artist who has celebrated his forty years in filmmaking. “Life has its twists and turns. Ten days ago I was in a hospital sick with COVID. Having recovered now…what an affirmation,” exclaimed Nick in his Facebook wall.

Screened were Deocampo’s thesis film “Adieu Philippines,” a documentary about expatriate Filipino artists living in France—abstract painters Nena Saguil and Macario Vitalis and printmaker Ofelia Gelvezon-Tequi. According to Nick, the main program consisted of “Oliver,” “The Sex Warriors and the Samurai,” “Revolutions happen like refrains in a song” and “Memories of Old Manila.”

“It was in 1981 that I received a scholarship from the French government to study filmmaking at the Centre du formacion au cinema direct under filmmakers like the legendary Jean Rouch among the lecturers. This served as my foundation for film training which got me hooked on the documentary as my cinema of choice,” recalled the award-winning filmmaker.

“Little did I realize that my training in Paris would prepare me for the challenges I was to face upon returning home in 1982. With my training in documentary filmmaking from a generation that brought activist filmmaking to the fore during the rise of the French nouvelle vague, I was fittingly armed with lessons on direct cinema. The spirit of counter-cinema was in the air. Military repression was still in effect in the country,” he added.

It was in 1983, immediately after Ninoy Aquino was assassinated, that Deocampo embarked on his doc filmmaking tackling socio-political topics.

Nick has done docs on dictatorship, revolution, coup d’etats, Asian environmental degradation, gay representation and cinema history in 3D animation.

Presently, he is embarking on the creation of a pedagogical cinema.

“It was a long journey from the atelier to the cinematheque. The spirit of the documentary gave me the courage to take the lonely and nomadic journey to capture the realities that defined much of our contemporary life on film,” Deocampo opined. The next showing of Nick’s films at Cinematheque Francais will be on January 7, 2022 to include “A Legacy of Violence,” “Cine Tala,” “Isaak” and “Private Wars.”