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.
The Filipino master of slow cinema intertwines a story of impoverished treasure hunters with the tale of a drifting woman coming to terms with a damaged mind and body. Extraordinary handheld camerawork captures the minutest of details, bringing the struggles of life into stark reality.
Like some of the best 19th-century novelists, Lav Diaz is a genius at interweaving multiple stories to create a truly expanded canvas of characters, landscapes and social and political struggle. In this masterpiece, three strands oppose each other and then, in an impressive arc, fall into parallel.
Lav Diaz’s majestically patient storytelling invests his infrequent documentaries with unusual concentration and power. The historical and psychic devastation of his epic dramas here becomes bracingly physical when focused on the detritus and poignant survival of children after Typhoon Yolanda.
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.