Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda have treaded the Off-Broadway boards in David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s 2013 disco-pop musical Here Lies Love. These historical figures, especially Imelda, are certainly fodder for musical theater. In Lauren Greenfield’s re-examination of the Marcos family, then and now, it’s easy to imagine the former first lady recast as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita, another striver who came from nothing and yielded glamour and enormous political power.

Imelda was orphaned at age eight, and her once-wealthy family had fallen upon hard times. After she became a beauty queen—Miss Manila—she met Congressman Ferdinand Marcos in 1954. As she recalls here, he proposed 20 minutes after they met. The couple married 11 days later. When he ran for the presidency in 1965, the impeccably dressed and coiffed Imelda developed into an asset on the campaign trail, singing folk songs before crowds. During his presidency, she went on her own “Rainbow Tour” (to borrow one song from Evita), meeting with heads of state while Ferdinand remained back in Manila, reportedly afraid to leave the country in case of coups.

Greenfield (Generation Wealth) began in 2014 interviewing and trailing Imelda, then 85, when the matriarch and her family were on the outs politically in the Philippines. The director initially was intrigued by the Marcoses’ weirdly H.G. Well–ian endeavor of removing 254 families from the island of Calauit and repopulating the land with imported African wildlife. Imelda claims that the island was abandoned before the project was implemented and the animals have now disappeared. However, Greenfield’s camera offers contradictory evidence: an interview of an islander who was kicked off her land and in sweeping aerial shots, giraffes and zebras roaming the island.

During her interviews with the director, Imelda Marcos is charming, ever defiant, and not the least of all, boastful, or perhaps delusional, describing herself later as the “mother of the Philippines.” Appearing with the same helmet-like bouffant she has sported for decades, she’s certainly upfront, admitting she misses having the clout of first lady, the ability to get projects done. In the opening sequence, she performs an act of noblesse oblige, handing out what she calls “candy for kids,” crisp peso bills to children on the street through her van’s window.

With assistants hovering off camera and kitschy, romanticized portraits of the Marcoses hanging in the background as she sits for her interview with Greenfield, Imelda’s responses are pithy, quotable, and wholly narcissistic; they could easily translate into an 11 o’clock number of either egotistical triumph or self-pity. Have your pick: “When you lose your money, er, your mother, you lose everything” (a slip of the tongue maybe?) and the film’s tagline, “Perception is real, the truth is not.”

If viewers find it easy to scoff at the pretensions of the former first lady, they’ll think twice when the tone and focus shift midway away from Imelda the raconteur, tenaciously clinging to her version of history, and expand into a bigger picture of the recent Filipino political scene: the Marcos family has riser once again to national prominence. (With its undulating strings, Jocelyn Pook’s elegant orchestral score turns sinister.) The filmmaker tags along Imelda’s son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, as he makes stump speeches during his 2016 vice presidential campaign, and at this point, Greenfield’s access to the family comes across as distant.

The director turns to a select group of commentators, politicians, and activists who fill in the blanks for the target audience, viewers outside of the Philippines who may not be aware of how much traction the Marcos brand has regained over the past few years. The family’s political resurrection has been accompanied by the downplaying and the historical revision of the military dictatorship era, both on the campaign trail and in one scene, in an elementary school.

When the Philippines was under martial law from 1972–80, it’s estimated that 3,200 people were killed and 35,000 tortured, including activists May Rodriguez and Etta Rosales. Their horrific accounts vividly capture the time period. Then there is the question of the loot stolen by the Marcoses in the mid-1980s, estimated by Andy Bautista, formerly of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, to be between five and 10 billion dollars. Imelda admits that before she fled Manila in 1986, she grabbed jewels and credits “diamonds in diapers” for the family’s survival.

There is plenty of material here for a limited television series or a number of films: the Marcos dictatorship, the revolution that ousted the Marcoses in 1986, or the 1970 scandal that nearly brought down Ferdinand Marcos’s presidency, his two-year relationship with American actress Dovie Beams. Their bedroom trysts were tape recorded; an American friend posits that it was Imelda who secretly recorded the couple, but at the time, Beams took credit and played them before the press. The film also suggests that after the affair, Imelda became more assertive, amassing her own empire of wealth, which leads to speculation to how that money is currently being spent behind the scenes.

Though the documentary has a lot on its plate, there are enough revelations here to satisfy news junkies or those who are trying to keep abreast of the latest developments in the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte. And given that Imelda partied at Studio 54 and knew everybody (Warhol!), there is one photo—and one of the few direct references to—Donald Trump, photographed alongside Imelda and Marla Maples.