Perry Dizon

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.

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.

Three people start a strange therapy to escape their agonies.

In the northern Philippine province of Luzon, a law school dropout commits a horrific double murder, a gentle family man takes the fall and receives a life sentence, leaving behind a wife and two kids. At their best, Lav Diaz’s marathon movies reveal just how much other films leave out. In his devastating twelfth feature (at over four hours in length, one of his shortest), the broad canvas accommodates both the irreducible facts of individual experience and the cosmic sweep of time and space. A careful rethinking of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment shot in blazing colour, this tour de force offers a masterful recapitulation of Diaz’s longstanding obsessions: cultural memory, national guilt, and the origin of evil. The wounds and defeats of Filipino history loom large in each of Diaz’s films. Fabian, the tortured anti-hero superbly played by Sid Lucero, may well be his most indelible creation, a haunting embodiment of the dead ends of ideology.