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.
Powerfully transplanting Dostoyevsky’s epic Crime and Punishment to his native Philippines, Norte offers a marked departure from Lav Diaz’ earlier (and longer!) B&W films. Shot in gorgeous color, the film is a solidly structured, tightly plotted masterpiece that weighs in on injustice and guilt.
An untold number of persons have disappeared in the Philippines over the years, before, during and after the Marcos dictatorship. Melancholia is devoted to the grief and search for meaning over such disappearances, told across a vivid array of Philippine society.
Filipino director Lav Diaz immerses us in the life and experience of Heremias, so beset by the corruption and troubles endemic to Philippine society. A saga of a modern Jeremiah, A modern parable told with angry compassion.
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.