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Erwin Romulo, the best friend of the late film critic Alexis Tioseco, recalls the events after the critic and his girlfriend Nika Bohinc’s murder during a burglary in their home in Quezon City. Lav Diaz makes use of one long take to allow Romulo an uninterrupted narration of the events.Read More »
The search for the body of Andres Bonifacio.
Clavis Films wrote:
A cinematographic fresco on the Philippine revolution against the Spanish colonial regime at the end of the 19th century. The film tells the story of several women, one of whom is in search of her husband kidnapped by the settlers. These damned souls roam a jungle of astonishing beauty. Like Bela Tarr, Lav Diaz is reinventing cinema here.Read More »
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Lakbayan (Journey) is an omnibus film that consists of Brillante Mendoza’s Desfocado (Defocused), Lav Diaz’s Hugaw (Dirt) and National Artis for Film Kidlat Tahimik’s Lakaran Ni Kabunyan (Kabunyan’s Journey).
It tells three tales of the Filipino journey. An unemployed cameraman joins a protest march of farmers asking the government to help them reclaim their ancestral land stolen by the powerful in Desfocado. In Hugaw, it is also the powerful that controls an island where a young miner contests the problems and the status quo. A mosaic artist is empowered as he arrives at his destination while traveling from island to island in Lakaran Ni Kabunyan.Read More »
The latest effort from a slow-cinema auteur known for his epic running times, “From What Is Before” is a longer sit than “Norte” (250 minutes) but a brisk jaunt compared with the likes of “Melancholia” (450 minutes), “Death in the Land of Encantos” (538 minutes) and “Evolution of a Filipino Family” (593 minutes). As ever, the effectiveness of Diaz’s approach depends on his finding a subject worthy of sustained rumination, and in this film, which he aptly describes as “a memory of a cataclysm,” it is the very act of remembering, of recalling the specific texture and atmosphere of his lost childhood, that seems to determine the duration of every shot and the placement of every cut. A poet-historian of longform cinema, Diaz seeks not merely to relay a series of events, but to draw us into a fully inhabited world.Read More »
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Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive degenerative disease found in individuals who have been subjected to multiple concussions and other forms of head injury. A variant of the condition, dementia pugilistica (DP), is primarily associated with boxing. CTE has been most commonly found in professional athletes participating in American football, ice hockey, professional wrestling and other contact sports, who have experienced head trauma, resulting in characteristic degeneration of brain tissue and the accumulation of tau protein. Individuals with CTE may show symptoms of dementia such as memory loss, aggression, confusion and depression which may appear within months of the trauma or many decades later. (Wikipedia)
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