The title character in “Bona,” a stark tale of selfless devotion by the Filipino director and prominent political activist Lino Brocka (1939-1991)fc188, is a middle-class Manila schoolgirl who develops a fierce, morbid attachment to a narcissistic movie extra — a fantasy all the more desperate for being set and shot on location in the miserable slum where her idol lives.

Made in 1980, thought lost, recently rediscovered and now digitally restored, “Bona” was featured in the most recent New York Film Festival and begins a weeklong run at Metrograph on Friday.

As mordant in its way as the slyly subversive movies Luis Buñuel made in Mexico, Brocka’s two-fisted melodrama is a hellish, compelling work by a director whom the French critic Serge Daney, then editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, called “the great filmmaker of the ’70s.”

“Bona” opens with a high-angle shot of a screen-filling crowd, participants in a Philippine religious spectacle, the Feast of the Black Nazarene. Glimpsed among the masses, Bona (Nora Aunor) is next seen as a star-struck spectator to a movie shoot whose extras include the handsome Gardo (Phillip Salvador, an axiom of Brocka’s cinema). Diminutive and determined, Bona cuts school to continue watching the production and, after a beating from her father, runs away to become Gardo’s devotee — an unpaid live-in maid.

Bona had plastered her room with pictures of Gardo. His image is similarly ubiquitous chez Gardo, a shack without plumbing in Manila’s largest slum, Tondo. Reporting on the 1982 Manila Film Festival, the journalist Elliott Stein noted that as the area was officially off-limits for film production, “Bona” was not simply a movie but “an admirable act of civil disobedience” — fitting for a movie in which “obedience” is key.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.fc188

• fc188
• Bona
• Filipina
• Superstar
• wreaks