Club Screening- The Kingmaker: A Documentary About Imelda Marcos, the Woman Who Divided a Nation

In The Kingmaker, award-winning photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield (The Queen of Versailles, Generation Wealth) continues her examination of extreme wealth, this time training her lens on Imelda Marcos, the widow of former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Infamous for her massive shoe collection, Imelda Marcos also will be remembered for her controversial role in Martial Law, a dark period when journalists and critics were muzzled or killed, and basic rights were curtailed. The Kingmaker examines Imelda Marcos’s efforts to regain power in the Philippines. Filmed over five years, it follows the former first lady – then in her late 80s – as she supports Rodrigo Duterte for president and the vice-presidential candidacy of her only son.

Greenfield interviews journalists and former political prisoners who give chilling testimony about the Marcoses. What results is a “cautionary tale of a powerful female leader whose questionable sense of reality divided a nation,” according to Greenfield’s production company. “In an age when fake news manipulates elections, Imelda’s comeback story serves as a dark fairy tale,” it added.

After the screening, we’ll be joined by Lauren Greenfield for a Q&A via Skype.

Named by The New York Times as “America’s foremost visual chronicler of the plutocracy”, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and photographer Lauren Greenfield has produced groundbreaking work on consumerism, youth culture and gender for the past 25 years. Her documentary films Thin, The Queen of Versailles, Generation Wealth and The Kingmaker, and photographic monographs, Fast Forward, Girl Culture, Thin and Generation Wealth, have been screened and exhibited in museums around the world.