Quote:
A Filipino poet hearkens back to his village after spending years in Europe. Horrified to discover that the community has been buried under landslides, he begins wandering through the countryside, reconnecting with friends, lovers and family members whose lives teeter on the brink of destruction.

14,10GB | 9h 04m | 1024×576 | mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/31094A9FCA2342D/Death_in_the_Land_of_Encantos_3.mkv

Language:Tagalog
Subtitles:English,French

The post Lav Diaz – Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga engkanto AKA Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

An artist struggles to finish his work. A storyline about a cult plays in his head. Fundamentalism will destroy the world. The artist destroys his muse in the process. He redeems her in the end.

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Language(s):Filipino, Tagalog, English
Subtitles:English (hardsub)

The post Lav Diaz – Siglo ng pagluluwal AKA Century of Birthing (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Crowned best film in Venice’s Horizons section, Lav Diaz’s latest madly uncommercial 7½-hour magnum opus, “Melancholia,” sets a trio of survivors wandering the country in a dirge to those lost to disaster. To reconcile themselves to the deaths of their leftist comrades and loved ones, two women and a man undertake a succession of role-changes as a radical form of grief therapy. But the alienation implied by their incarnations of a prostitute, pimp and nun, assumed at the pic’s opening, reads as anything but therapeutic.

Mubi wrote:
An eight-hour meditation on the maddening persistence of sadness in this world, divided into three parts following a prostitute, a pimp and a nun who wander the countryside.

“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.”

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Language(s):Filipino
Subtitles:English (Hardcoded)

The post Lav Diaz – Melancholia (2008) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote

One of the most adventurous filmmakers to emerge from the Philippines in decades, Lav Diaz is, in many ways, the spiritual father of what some have called the Filipino New Wave, a group of filmmakers who have adopted digital technology to create an intimate and raw style. At the same time, he stands separate from them, often working on an epic scale and addressing historical shifts in Philippine society. (See his epochal Ebulysion: Evolution of a Filipino Family.)

His latest, Century of Birthing, also stands on its own. Telling two seemingly unrelated tales, it is a grand meditation on the roles of the artist, the prophet and the acolyte. The first story focuses on Homer, a filmmaker who has spent years working on his latest opus — and still isn’t happy with it. Hounded by friends, co-workers and festival programmers to finish the damn thing, he resists every entreaty, countering a programmer’s pleas to send him the film with, “I don’t make films for festivals, I make them for cinema.” (The story plays a little like 8½, minus the surrealism and with a dollop of Warhol thrown in.) The second story concentrates on a Christian cult in a rural region — a group largely comprised of young women (referred to as “virgins”) and dominated by its charismatic leader, Father Turbico. When one of the longest-standing members strays, the impact is catastrophic for both her and the cult.

Diaz portrays both men as troubled and problematic figures, pressured to perform but also ruled by their own romantic conception of themselves. Father Turbico carefully primps himself before meeting with one of his disciples. Homer gives long interviews about the nature of cinema — Diaz, as if to indicate that he’s not convinced by his apparent stand-in’s rhetoric, drowns out the dialogue with industrial noise and almost-decipherable chatter. The characters are linked by public professions of fealty to their gods (Homer’s devotion to cinema; Turbico’s peculiar take on Christianity), and both have followers whose devotion proves to be less than healthy.

Told almost entirely in long takes that are alternately transfixing, claustrophobic and penetrating, Century of Birthing boasts exquisite black-and-white imagery. Indeed, it may be Diaz’s most entrancing film to date — and it’s certainly his most personal. –TIFF

3.90GB | 5 h 58 min | 720×416 | avi

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Language(s):Tagalog
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

The post Lav Diaz – Siglo ng pagluluwal AKA Century of Birthing (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A Filipino poet named Benjamin Agusan (Roeder Camanag) is the hapless native who returns to his hometown Padang to witness the aftermath of the super typhoon. For the past seven years, Benjamin had been living in an old town called Kaluga in Russia. With his grant and residency, he taught and conducted workshops in a university. The poet published two books of sadness and longing in the process. In Russia, Benjamin was able to shoot video collages, fell in love with a Slavic beauty, buried a son, and almost went mad. He came back to bury his dead-father, mother, sister and a lover. He came back to face Mount Mayon, the raging beauty and muse of his youth. He came home to confront the country that he so loved and hated, the Philippines. He came back to die in the land of his birth. He wanders around the obliterated village meeting old friends and lovers.

7.58GB | 9h 01m | 720×430 | mkv

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Language(s):Filipino, Bicolano, English, Tagalog
Subtitles:English (hardsubs)

The post Lav Diaz – Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga engkanto AKA Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Melancholia (Lav Diaz, 2008)

Lav Diaz’s Melancholia is an eight-hour meditation of sorts on the maddening persistence of sadness in this world, can logically be divided into three parts and an epilogue. The first part details the experiences in Sagada of Julian (Perry Dizon), Alberta (Angeli Bayani) and Rina (Malaya Cruz) as they refashion themselves into different drastic identities as part of the radical process that Julian created in order for them to cope with the losses of their loved ones. The second part is set in Manila, with Julian and Alberta living their real lives and addressing the scenarios and situations that accompany their melancholic predicament. The third part is the prologue to Julian, Alberta and Rina’s prolonged tale of sadness, where deep within the forests of Mindoro, a band of leftist fighters, which includes Alberta’s husband Renato (Roeder Camanag), is struggling with the psychological and spiritual torture of both practical and existential defeat while being hunted down by military operatives.

Melancholia is most probably Diaz’s most difficult film for the lone reason that Diaz affords little or no comfort to his viewers. There is very little humor to the film and the story, grounded by philosophies and ideas that might be too personal or hard to grasp, branches into different and sometimes convoluted directions. However, as with most of Diaz’s films, the reward of completing one is not in the pleasure of sitting through eight hours of his trademark black and white aesthetics and seemingly endless ramblings and conversations, but in the lingering and often valid points that Diaz would have you digesting and exploring for a far longer period of time.

I. Transformations and Transgressions in Sagada

Julian lets Alberta and Rina watch his sex performers

Alberta becomes Jenine, a prostitute who does massages for 300 pesos and other services for more. Julian turns into a pimp who for the right price can stage live sex shows within the privacy of a hotel room. Rina is a Catholic nun who wanders around town with her charity basket, begging for money for charity. They would bump into each other on occasions: with Jenine handily getting some change to put into the nun’s charity basket before fleeting away to her destination, or the pimp taking photographs of the nun before mouthing slogans about the futility of living in a country and a world that is practically hell, or Jenine being courted by the pimp to do business for him. In Sagada, they do not know each other. Though in reality, they are all survivors who have subscribed to the extremist idea that in order to cope with the fact of having a loved one disappear and be presumed dead, they should shed their identities and see the world through the eyes of another.

The three would eventually meet at the same time as the three of them seek shelter from the rain inside an abandoned building in the middle of the town. The line that separates truth and fiction are blurred, as Jenine and the pimp recount their respective histories as if the personalities they inhabited are real. It may be argued that fictionalizing one’s life story may be an easy feat. However, it is the disturbing direction of their conversation when the nun arrives in the abandoned building that gives the prolonged scene a harrowing distinction. The pimp starts cornering the nun, berating her of the futility of her efforts within the spectrum of evil that has consumed the world. In the background, Jenine is amused at the lopsided confrontation, wherein the nun coyly mutters meaningless quotes while the pimp expounds on the the world’s state of hopelessness. Defeated, the nun escapes the scene as the two admitted sinners rejoice in their triumph.

The nun is the only one to surrender and give up. It seems that in a world that has been enveloped by sadness, it is the meek, and pure that fall first as victims. In Rina’s transformation as a nun, she has seen the world from the vantage point of innocence, and the continuing acts of evildoing, apathy, and madness may have dealt upon her despair and hopelessness. Her transformation seems easiest as compared to being a whore or a pimp, since it seems less taxing to roam the streets begging for alms. However, the transgression in her existence, upon seeing the state of the world through the eyes of a person who was tasked to save it or at least ease its pain and being unable to do anything, is far more damaging. Her transformation deviates the most from the world. Her assumed identity is an aberration, especially in a landscape that has forgotten virtues.

Diaz posits an intriguing concept: that survival is earned by those who swear allegiance with truth, and truth is what we see in this world: melancholia, death, amorality, and atheism. There is truth in sex, the way the pimp’s sex performers copulate in the total absence of love, hate, or any other emotion. There is truth in prostitution, the way our bodies have turned into mere commodities and stripped of any religion-labeled value. The nun, at one point of the segment, visits a widowed mother she had the opportunity to converse with while begging for alms. Inside the church, the mother sings a melody while the nun observes in the background before leaving. Outside, she walks away, answers her phone and tells her friend that she is okay. During that moment, upon being exposed the utter futility of faith, she finds a semblance of comfort, although temporary since later, she would take her own life in a final act of despair.

II. Patricia’s Song

Patricia sings of searching

Diaz forwards the story further, detailing the lives of Julian and Alberta weeks after their stints as pimp and whore, respectively, in Sagada. Julian is a publisher in Manila who often dreams of her dead wife Patricia (Cooky Chua). Alberta, on the other hand, is a school principal who while coping with the disappearance of her husband, has to take care of her ward Hannah (Yanyan Taa), a teenager who was rendered parentless when both her parents were abducted and killed by government officials. Hannah, to address her situation, repels Alberta’s acts of kindness by repeatedly escaping from her protection and prostituting herself.

Julian chats with an old friend (Bodjie Pascua), an author who pitches his manuscript for publication. In their conversation about the story of Julian’s friend’s book, Diaz expounds his passion for cinema, correlating his philosophies on truth with art. According to the friend (whose language is not dissimilar to Diaz’s), our basic concept of Philippine cinema has been grounded on lies and escapism. The only way to dispel this harmful imposition against culture is through a drastic change, fueled by pain and passion as the main character of the book, a famed director who after losing his lover, reforms into a producer of independent films while acknowledging his homosexuality, has gone through.

In Julian’s dream, Patricia sings of her endless search against the backdrop of coldness and pain in the world. The song sets the mood and tone of the film. In a sense, the song summarizes the characters’ need to search: for their lost loved ones, for a reason behind the sadness and the madness of the world, an impossible happiness or contentment, for Hannah, for truth. Melancholia’s landscape is familiar (city streets, humble abodes, riverside parks), but its characters are placed in a situation where they have turned into desperate searchers, fueled at first by grief and longing and then by some other force or motivation that is as elusive as their targets. The repercussions of their exercise in Sagada are faint (although Rina’s suicide becomes the trigger of Julian’s deep contemplation) if not damaging as opposed to being the cure to their collective sadness. Even the discovery of the remains of some victims of political killings failed to release them from their collective burdens. In the end, they are still looking for sense and direction and all at once, the familiar places start to look like alien landscapes, enunciated by the violence of the rain or the discomfort of the night. These places convert into limbo.

This persistent searching is true to the theme of Diaz’s cinema, which would often allude to some kind of redemption or release in the conclusion, whether it be in the form of Juan Mijares’ acceptance of his and his nation’s past in Batang West Side (West Side Avenue, 2001), or the wayward oxcart-driver’s deal with God in Heremias (2006), or Hamin’s release from the world’s madness through death in Kagadanan sa Banwaan Ning Mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos, 2007). However, in Melancholia, the characters are trapped in limbo (in fact, an offshoot of Melancholia which makes use of some footage made for the film is aptly entitled Purgatorio (2008), referring to the eternal state of being neither here or there of the family left behind by the victims of political killings) and are seemingly in a directionless search for something that can never be found.

III. No Redemption for the Poet-Warrior

Renato is chased into the forest

Renato writes in his diary “Why is there so much sadness and too much sorrow in this world? Is happiness just a concept? Is living just a process to measure man’s pain? Are we ever going to see each other again? I’m not afraid of death. I’m more afraid that I won’t see you again.'” Renato, a leftist activist who left his wife to fight a war of principles, is now being chased into the forest by military operatives who want him and his comrades silenced.

Diaz painstakingly details the final few days of this band of men who are merely prolonging their assured demise under their enemies. Some of them start to falter, giving way to insanity and defeat, enveloped by the lurking senselessness of their struggle amidst a world drowned by indifference and apathy. He writes further “I now realized the lyrical madness to this struggle. It is all about sadness. It is about my sadness. It is about the sorrow of my people. I cannot romanticize the futility of it all. Even the majestic beauty of this island could not provide an answer to this hell. There is no cure to this sadness.”

Renato writes words of despair. Strangled by his impending capture and death, he starts to rationalize the bitter truth that beneath the illusions and promises dealt by momentous beauty, emotions, and moments of fleeting happiness, is a world that is barren and replete of hope. His and his comrades’ deaths come swiftly in a moment where one of them, in an act of desperation, expresses surrender. Their deaths did not release them from purgatory. Instead, as we have learned from the film’s previous scenes in Sagada and Manila, their deaths are black holes that pull loved ones into a void, a metaphoric limbo where they undergo futile searches for logic and reason, goals that have been rendered implausible by the realities of pain and suffering in this world .

The sequence in the forest does not provide redemption for Alberta either. She still does not know where her husband’s remains were left. She has not read the words Renato has written in his diary. All she knows is that her husband is gone and most probably dead. There is yet no closure for the victims, only closure in Diaz’s circle of melancholia, where the man-made, or more accurately, governmental act of depravity and cowardice has caused the never-ending cycle of sadness and madness to begin.

IV. Epilogue

Alberta and Julian meet again

The riverside park at nighttime, dimly lit by streetlamps that scarcely dot the walkpath, serves as Diaz’s stage for his confounding finale. Alberta searches for Julian among the men and women (performance artists who contort their bodies into unusual shapes and positions) that populate the park’s spaces. Cryptic phrases, recited in hypnotic cadence, are thrown in reply to Alberta’s fervent questioning. She finally locates Julian, alone and seated in the dark, dissheveled in appearance and obviously in the same trance-like state of the park’s curious residents. From Alberta and Julian’s conversation, we can glean that Julian has turned into a monster, consumed by his own search for the truth, eaten up by the pain and sadness that he has tried to cope with, and ironically, embraced it to create. Julian has become God, the personification of the melancholy and insanity of the world, the only things that can be labeled as definite truths in a world that deceives us with illusions of joy and beauty. He walks away, claiming that he is no longer Julian. Alberta is left alone.

Although the film can be seen as Diaz’s definitive statement (and it probably is, Diaz being very vocal on politics) on the desaparecidos, the numbers of which have risen during Macapagal-Arroyo’s term as president, and the families they have left in stasis, there is definitely something deeper: a philosophical or existential query that Diaz throws to his viewers on the basis of the world’s current status. Melancholia aims to expound on truth by distorting it (where Julian, Alberta and Rina assume fake identities in Sagada as coping mechanism to battle their sadness), disrespecting it (where the trio start living and believing their assumed identities), mutating it (where the trio can no longer discern the line that divides reality and illusion), and finally, spiting it (where truth, as personified by Julian, shows itself as pitiful and pathetic).
Oggs Cruz

Beyond the Time Barrier
Review by Christoph Huber

Hollywood may have taught us that It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, but Lav Diaz reminds us that the world is also sad sad sad sad. And if that repeptition sounds crushing to you (whereas the one in the title of Stanley Kramer’s Hollywood film is just there to tickle), you are on the right track: Inaugurated by the epic masterpiece Evolution of a Filipino Family (Ebolusyon ng isang pamilyang pilipino, 2004), the Filipino’s director recent cycle of black-and-white video works, with their seemingly unwieldy lengths – inbetween seven and eleven hours – represent a unique achievment and ofer unique experiences in the history of cinema. Their length is not an affectation, but a necessity, in reaching for heights of expression that the conventional (and commercial) “rules” of moviemaking deny. They demand (but also: allow, for their durational strategy is ultimately liberating) uncommon dedication and concentration by the viewer, whose patience is rewarded with a physical experience of time and a stunning, singularly concrete feeling about their spaces, emotions and characters unlike almost anything else. The film’s world starts to feel lived-in (and in that sense, Diaz’ penchant for unbroken marathon screenings of his work is all the more understandable: bringing food and other stuff to the cinema, you have to make the screening room something like your living room: a lived-in place as well).

Which in a roundabout way, brings us to the ingeniously titled Melancholia, (after all, already Hippocrates characterized as the symptoms of melancholia “all fears and despondencies, if they last a long time” – a perfect match for the director’s temporal strategies.) For Diaz’ most recent film, the highlight of the Orrizonti section at the 2008 Venice film festival, whose main prize it deservedly won, is on the one hand a deeply moving seven-and-a-half-hour lament about resistance against all odds following through on the now somewhat familiar strategies of the filmmakers’ recent work. On the other hand, its remarkable structure and subtle revelations of layers, adopting a (self-)critical stance (both in respect to its characters as well as to itself – and both political as well as aesthetic) mark it as maybe the boldest experiment yet in Diaz’s daring reconception of cinema-as-we-know it.
In the beginng Melancholia may seem linear and following the logic of a conventional narrative – a tale of a prostitute, a pimp and a nun in a small town in the Philippines, described with Diaz’ characteristic attention to details and rhythms of life, of perception and thought. But in the first of two decisive breaks – roughly after a third, respectively two thirds into the film – these carefully rendered lives prove to be chimeras made up to deal with the pain of existence and the throwbacks in the fight for freedom equality. From then on, sounds and motives (not just visual ones) begin to dominate the flow: A woman wailing unforgettably in the jungle, her sad ballad haunting the proceedings, as the losses and crushed hopes of the protagonists become ever clearer. Ever the commited filmmaker, Diaz not only insists on the political dimension – for all its depression, Melancholia is nothing less than a cri de coeur for continuing revolution -, but also incorporates fascinating detours into the situation of Filipino filmmaking (reminding one, for instance, of the crucial Brocka subplot in Ebolusyon).

“Why is there so much sadness and too much madness in this world? Is happiness just a concept? Is living just a process to measure man’s pain?”, asked Diaz in his director’s note accompanying the film’s description in the Venice Festival catalogue. The answers to the last to questions seemingly remain ambivalent: the wounded world of Melancholia may suggest desperation at times, but the effort of the characters to struggle on – and the efforts of Diaz himnself, who from what are nearly no-budget filmmaking circumstances, wrestles a richness, both philosophical and artistic, that all those pricier films daren’t even dream of – also touches deeply, with a renewed sense of hope and commitment that remains incorruptible even under the most adverse of circumstances. Beyond the time barrier, Diaz’ filmmaking manages to open reservoirs mostly untapped by cinematic (or “visual”) art. There is a long sequence of guerillas in the jungle near the end, whose radical means and spiritual dimension begin to suggest what Steven Soderbergh recently persumably tried for, and miserably failed to achieve in his two-part epic about Che (Guevara). One of Diaz’ fighters writes in his notebook: “I now realized the lyrical madness to this struggle. It is all about sadness. It is about my sadness. It is all about the sorrow of my people. I cannot romanticize the futility of it all. Even the majestic beauty of this island could not provide an answer to this hell. There is no cure to this sadness.” By bearing witness to this sadness, without simply succumbing to it, by speaking out about to the woes of the world and our times, Diaz offers a poetic approach that may be somewhat disillusioned, yet is clearly driven by an unrelenting urge and a refusal to give in, whether to the (mostly unwritten) laws of the market, to the (obvious, but mostly circumscribed) failure of politics, or to the (downplayed) worldwide decline of ideology, solidarity and humanist values. As Robert Burton noted in “The Anatomy of Melancholy” back in 1621: “All poets are mad.” Lav Diaz may be one of the maddest of them all.

Christoph Huber

An eight-hour, intermission-less film may be daunting to many, but such is the incomparable, experiential cinema of Lav Diaz, one of the most singular filmmakers of his generation. Diaz is a formidable and unique figure in contemporary world cinema. Widely recognized as the “godfather” of the New Filipino cinema, Diaz, through mentorship and guided collaboration, has significantly contributed to the rise of a young and prolific digital cinema movement. Given his films are unavailable on DVD and their marathon lengths obviate any form of commercial play, we are extremely pleased to present, in conjunction with Images Festival, the North American premiere of Diaz’s latest film, Melancholia.

Directed, written, shot, edited and produced by Diaz, Melancholia is en epic tone poem of novelistic proportions. Displaying his signature high definition black-and-white video, with a palette ranging from chiaroscuro to ash, Melancholia comprises a triptych story of suffering, in which three characters assume roles in order to escape their personal despair. Alberta plays a reluctant prostitute, Julian her pimp, and Rina a charity-seeking nun as the trio attempt to quell their all-consuming grief by feigning alternate existences, worlds away from their bourgeois lives. A flip in chronology reveals the source of Alberta’s pain: her husband Renato, a leftist activist, has gone to fight a bloody war of ideals and is presumed dead. Diaz leads us to him, making us bear witness to a world of madness. The film is both a political statement on the desaparecidos (those kidnapped by military operatives) as much as it is a lamentation about the gloomy state of the world. While Melancholia may be Diaz’s bleakest work yet, it’s as poetic as it is punk, and features a music interlude by his noise rock band, The Brockas (named after Lino Brocka), with Diaz on electric guitar and fellow director Khavn De la Cruz on keyboards. The film won the “Orrizonti” (Horizons) award at last year’s Venice film festival, a distinction honouring innovation in film form and spirit; the jury was headed by Chantal Akerman, a filmmaker whose greatest work, Jeanne Dielman, (screening on March 19 & 22) is likewise a monument of silent suffering. “Melancholia proves once again the enrapturing and mesmerizing power of Lav Diaz’s cinema, a spell that captures you from the very first frames and carries you throughout the film’s fluvial length, by enveloping the viewer in political dramas of great emotional and lyrical resonance” (Paolo Bertolin, Venice Film Festival). – Andréa Picard

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Language(s):Filipino
Subtitles:English (hardsubs)

The post Lav Diaz – Melancholia (2008) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

Diaz films his landscapes in monochrome master shots that can stretch on uninterrupted for minutes, lingering on the sight of a bull roaming the jungle freely, or craggy rock formations that serve as a bulwark against a violently churning sea. The fragile interplay of nature and civilization is best expressed in the way Diaz frequently sets the stage for each scene, allowing us to absorb the contours and details of every location before ever so gradually introducing human characters, looking small and ant-like, into the frame. These are people who deeply understand the degree to which they rely on the land, and also the extent to which they are at its mercy.

In this remote rural village, traditional beliefs coexist and even intermingle with Christianity, the latter represented by the kind Father Guido (Joel Saracho), and the former by two sisters, Itang (Hazel Orencio) and Joselina (Karenina Haniel), who are believed to possess healing powers. Itang, the older of the two, is selflessly devoted to Joselina, whose gifts may explain the mental and physical disturbances that rack her body like that of a woman possessed. But it will take more than mere supernatural phenomena to account for the inexplicable menace that seems to taken up residence in this impoverished, weather-beaten village, and that slowly makes itself known over the film’s first two hours.

Cows are found hacked to death in a field, costing barrio elder Sito (Perry Dizon, also credited as production designer) and his young nephew, Hakob (Reynan Abcede), their jobs watching over the herd. Three huts are burned to the ground one night. A man’s body is discovered in the middle of a road, bearing a mysterious neck wound (is there a vampire at work?). In contrast with “The White Ribbon,” the ambiguity is ultimately dispelled, the mystery clearly resolved, and fortunately the solution is tied to something more substantial than a facile theory of innate human malevolence. The men and women of the barrio are fundamentally decent people, which does not, as Diaz understands, negate their capacity for startling acts of violence.

The filmmaker’s deliberate pace gives him ample time to explore this troubling conundrum, to weigh the morality of his characters’ thoughts and deeds without passing judgment. Father Guido has a long (if one-sided) conversation on the viability of telling a compassionate lie with Tony (Roeder Camanag), a handsome winemaker who’s sheltering a dark secret. Sito has his own painful truths to spill regarding the matter of Hakob’s parentage, and when they arrive, they merely confirm our sense of a world that has long since tipped into madness. It’s no surprise that the only contemptible figure here, a peddler and a meddler named Heding (a terrific Mailes Kanapi), is someone bent on uncovering everyone else’s private matters, spreading lies and rumors that represent the opposite of Diaz’s patient observational probing.

Eventually the military arm of Marcos’ regime intervenes, as soldiers enter the barrio, impose a curfew and promise to guard the locals from the “enemies” of the Philippines, provided they cooperate. It’s an offer of protection that feels more like a threat, and although the full nature of that threat takes its time revealing itself, the fiery devastation of the brutal final images leave no doubt. The army’s incursion in this remote rural outpost takes on the feel of a crime against nature, a violation of the unspoken moral and spiritual laws governing a community that, for all its imperfections, has always taken care of its own. While Diaz seeks to memorialize that community’s destruction, he also wants us to remember that it once existed, which is why he dwells so lovingly on scenes of quotidian life, exalting everyday struggles through living, breathing tableaux.

Mula.sa.kung.ano.ang.noon.AKA.From.What.Is.Before.2014.576p.WEB-DL.AAC.2.0.H.264-SHR.mkv

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Audio
#1:  	Tagalog 2.0ch AAC LC @ 127 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/F2B9FFDF9F6A225/Mula.sa.kung.ano.ang.noon.AKA.From.What.Is.Before.2014.576p.WEB-DL.AAC.2.0.H.264-SHR.mkv

Language(s):Filipino, Tagalog, English
Subtitles:English (hardsub)

The post Lav Diaz – Mula sa kung ano ang noon AKA From What Is Before (2014) first appeared on Cinema of the World.