Selda.

I watched parts of the documentary about Ninoy Aquino last night over at ANC.  It had interviews of Lupita Kashiwahara, Butz Aquino, Noynoy Aquino, and friends and colleagues of the late Senator.  It showed his speech in an American University, his trial, his campaign for the Batasang Pambansa seat, his younger days and his last days. 

Ninoy was incarcerated for a total of seven years, and some of these were in isolation.  His tiny prison cell had been replicated at the Aquino residence in Times St.

A person dear to me was also imprisoned during the Martial Law years; she was a member of the cultural group of SDK.  Their group had just finished performing when Martial Law was declared, and they were promptly arrested and brought to Camp Servillano Aquino in Tarlac.

This brings to mind movies where the setting is a prison camp.  I enjoy watching these types of films.  I've seen several times the movie, The Rock starring Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery, Green Mile starring Tom Hanks, Papillon starring Dustin Hoffman and Steve Mcqueen, the old movie, Escape from Alcatraz starring Clint Eastwood, and the even older film, Cool Hand Luke starring Paul Newman.  

But the prison movies which really left an imprint in my mind are the Midnight Express which starred Brad Davis, a movie about a young American student who tried to smuggle hashish out of Turkey, and showed abuses and violence inside the Turkish prison, and Papillon starring Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen, a movie about two convicts who agreed to protect each other while waiting in prison.  

In Papillon, "a man makes friends with a fellow inmate while they are serving sentence on a notorious island prison and he plots his hellish escape. The petty criminal known as Papillon is unjustly convicted of murder (specifically, murdering a pimp) in the 1930s and sentenced to life imprisonment in a French penitentiary on Devil's Island in French Guiana. He attempts several escapes, which result in many punishments, but after more than a decade (at least seven years of which were spent in solitary confinement as punishment for his escape attempts), he eventually succeeds in escaping to freedom." 

Ninoy Aquino didn't escape from prison; he was released to undergo heart surgery in Boston. Then he was murdered on his return to the Philippines. His captor and jailer, Ferdinand Marcos was flown out of the country into Hawaii, during the People Power I and was brought back to the Philippines in a casket.