Lav’s Golden Leopard winner in Locarno is an epic remembrance of a period of transition that marked the traumatic time of dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ rule. The film’s structure unfurls with slow power, growing increasingly complex, political, and emotional over its five-and-a-half hour story.

One of the most crucial aspects of the cinema of Filipino director Lav Diaz is a desire—or, most likely, a need—to connect the Philippines of the colonial past with the Philippines of the present. This film vividly does exactly that: a portrait of today seen through the eyes of a country’s history.