Insiang at the 44th New York Film Festival

I didn't get a chance to see this movie while I was still in the Philippines. I believe it was first shown in 1978 when I was a very young teenager. Now that I'm a lot older, I'm just plain curious and wondering if I really missed something here.
Is it a gem of a movie? I only remember watching 'Maynila, sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag' starring Bembol Roco and Hilda Koronel. When I was in elementary grade, we usually have these 'fund raising' activities and one of them is always selling movie tickets for a special showing. Some of these movies were not even fit for kids our age but the whole elementary grade level were there all the time. The priests who run the school always made sure to give us a lot of these tickets and they were 'good as sold'. That was really a sure way to raise funds.

Anyway, the 44th New York Film Festival will have a retrospective screening of 'Insiang', a film by Lino Brocka with Hilda Koronel as Insiang.

Here's a portion of the press release:

The New York Film Festival Selection Committee has chosen 28 films to debut at the 44th New York Film Festival, September 29 - October 15, at Lincoln Center, it was announced today by Richard Peña, program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and chair of the NYFF Selection Committee.

The New York Film Festival is not a competitive festival, nor is it programmed according to any theme or category, but instead presents a “selection of the best films from around the world,” says Peña. This year is no exception; the 28 films come from all corners of the globe. The line up also includes three retrospective screenings of classic films: Lino Brocka’s Insiang, a Filipino film from 1976; Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso, a comic classic from the Golden Age of Italian cinema; and the previously announced 25-anniversary screening of Warren Beatty’s Reds.

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Insiang Lino Brocka, The Philippines, 1976

The first Filipino film screened at the Cannes Film Festival, Insiang begins as the title character, marvelously played by Hilda Koronel, watches as her mother, Tonia (Mona Lisa), eases her relatives out of their ramshackle house so that she can ease in her boyfriend, Dado (Ruel Vernal). It doesn’t take long for Dado to notice the beautiful Insiang, and soon the three are locked in a vicious emotional and sexual triangle clearly heading for some kind of explosion. Like his contemporary R.W. Fassbinder, Brocka used the conventions of melodrama in order to transcend them; if Hell is other people, with Insiang Brocka created one darkest visions of the inferno ever committed to film. A New York Film Festival Retrospective.