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“Essential Truths of the Lake” is the last thing most people would expect from Lav Diaz: a direct follow-up to his previous film, “When the Waves Are Gone.” It’s not a sequel, per se (this one actually comes earlier), but they are connected, with a third movie featuring the same disillusioned police detective in the works.

The Filipino filmmaker, whose pokey social critiques run anywhere from three to 11 hours, established the character of Lt. Hermes Papauran (John Lloyd Cruz) in “Waves.” Described there as “arguably the greatest Filipino investigator ever,” he’s Diaz’s version of “The Singing Detective”: a tortured enforcer afflicted with a skin condition that reflects on the surface the conflict and cynicism roiling within him. He’s a good cop in a corrupt country, furious with how Rodrigo Duterte mishandled the war on drugs.

It’s a basic rule of dramaturgy that it...

Lav Diaz is “concerned” about the situation in his native Philippines. But it doesn’t mean he will stop making films.

“If you do any kind of cultural work, you can be branded as a ‘communist’ and it’s a reason for them to kill you,” he says.

“There aren’t many venues to show my films, so we basically give them away for free. Listen, I am aware of the danger. But you have to accept the reality, confront these issues and continue to make things. And be careful, because we know what happened to Salman Rushdie.”

Diaz, speaking to Variety at Armenia’s Golden Apricot festival, where he headed the jury, also opened up about his upcoming Locarno world premiere “Essential Truths of the Lake.”

The film, which contends in main competition for the Golden Leopard, sees him returning to investigator Hermes Papauran from “When the Waves Are Gone,...

Films Boutique will handle international sales on Filipino master Lav Díaz’s “Essential Truths of The Lake,” one of the highest-profile titles in the just announced main International Competition at this year’s Locarno Festival.

The Berlin and Lyon-based production-sales company’s fifth collaboration with Diaz following, among others, Venice Golden Bear Winner “The Woman Who Left” and Berlin Silver Bear Winner “Lullaby To A Sorrowful Mystery,” “Essential Truths of The Lake” marks a prequel to Diaz’s ‘When The Waves Are Gone’ that premiered out of competition at Venice last year.

It reprises the character of the ethically conflicted police lieutenant Hermes Papauran, one of the best investigators of the Philippines. When asked what drives a man to search for the truth, Papauran says dejectedly that maybe he just wants to keep inflicting pain on himself.

Faced with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody murders and brazen lies, he...

Best Friend Forever has unveiled the trailer for “To The North,” Romanian Mihai Mincan’s feature debut which is world premiering in the Horizons section at Venice.

Inspired by true events, the edgy thriller follows Joel, a religious Filipino sailor who finds a Romanian stowaway, Dumitru, hidden between some containers during his shift on a transatlantic ship. Joel decides to hide him and subsequently starts feeling tormented by his crew, friends and even God.

“To The North” stars Soliman Cruz, Niko Becker, Bart Guingona and Olivier Ho Hio Hen (“Stillwater”). The topnotch crew includes cinematographer George Chiper-Lillemark (“Immaculate”), sound designer Nicolas Becker (“Sound Of Metal”) and sound mixer Cyril Holtz (“The Sister Brothers”).

“To The North” is produced by Radu Stancu at De Film Production, and co-produced by Remora Films, Studio Bauhaus, Screening Emotions and Background Films.

Best Friend Forever 2022 line-up also includes Oscar-nominated director Alê Abreu’s a”Perlimps...

Brussels-based company Best Friend Forever has acquired international sales rights to Mihai Mincan’s drama thriller “To The North” which will world premiere at Venice in the Horizons section.

Inspired by true events, the film follows Joel, a religious Filipino sailor, who finds a Romanian stowaway, Dumitru, hidden between some containers during his shift on a transatlantic ship. Joel decides to hide him and subsequently starts feeling tormented by his crew, friends and even God.

“To The North” stars Soliman Cruz, Niko Becker, Bart Guingona and Olivier Ho Hio Hen (“Stillwater”). The topnotch crew includes cinematographer George Chiper-Lillemark (“Immaculate”), sound designer Nicolas Becker (“Sound Of Metal”) and sound mixer Cyril Holtz (“The Sister Brothers”).

“To The North” is produced by De Film Production (“Alis”), Remora Films, Studio Bauhaus, Screening Emotions and Background Films.

“We can’t be prouder to represent the film. It is surprisingly masterful for a debut, an immersive cinematographic experience,...

It is in the nature of cinema, similar to other arts, to tackle the questions which have been discussed and re-evaluated time and time again. While the term “slow cinema” is often used to solely focus on the pace of a feature, it may also be a sign of short-sightedness, for the slowness in the works of Lav Diaz is linked to the issues he discusses, in the stories he tells, from society to politics, always with a strong human focus. His new feature “Genus, Pan” was, as the filmmaker states, inspired by an answer he gave many years ago to the question to how he would define humans and his reply that they are nothing more than animals. Considering the events of the past years, Diaz came back to the statement, thinking how the current times might have proven him right and so the idea for “Genus, Pan” was born,...

With his latest feature Genus Pan, the king of slow cinema Lav Diaz proves that even his fleet-footed efforts can be an unrelenting experience. Clocking in at a smooth 157 minutes, this blistering allegory takes place almost entirely on the ghostly terrain of Hugaw Island. The poverty-stricken Filipino enclave is populated with superstitious citizens who often confront the misery and unfairness of modern life by embracing legends and mythologies of old.

A purposefully bleak exploration of moral rot, Genus Pan‘s stark black-and-white photography amplifies the contrasting shades between shifting natural light and our own self-destructive impulses. It feels stylistically connected to some of Diaz’s recent epics Norte, the End of History and The Woman Who Left specifically, but is far angrier in tone, presenting in potent detail the small acts of jealousy and greed that eventually lead to violence.

Much of the film’s scathing historical subtext gets referenced...

Seemingly stepping away from the bluntly combative political screed and satire of his last few films, “Genus Pan” finds preeminent Filipino auteur Lav Diaz in a more broadly philosophical mood. National leaders may remain caught in his languidly focused crosshairs, but only because he’s zoomed out to target humankind as a whole: From its ape-referencing title downwards, Diaz’s latest announces itself unsubtly as an unhappy allegory for the base, animalistic nature of man.

That highly generalized subject would appear to promise an especially sprawling, expansive work from a director known for his endurance-testing runtimes. Yet “Genus Pan” turns out to be Diaz’s shortest narrative feature since 2011’s “Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution,” clocking in at a relatively jaunty 157 minutes, and paring the bulk of its narrative down to a minimalist, albeit unhurried, three-hander — expanded directly from “Hugaw,” his contribution to the 2018 portmanteau film “Lakbayan.” Like that short,...

And the names and faces of the tyrants changeBut poverty, pain and murder remainsAnd the voices of truth are locked up in chainsDarkness remains, freedom in flames—The Jerks, RageIn Lino Brocka's big-city melodrama Manila in the Claws of Light (1975), set at the height of Ferdinand Marcos's 1972-1986 military-backed dictatorship, construction worker Julio and his colleagues are subjected to a form of labor abuse nicknamed "taiwan": if at the end of the working day they want to receive their salary, they have to buy it from their employer by waiving 10% of the money they are owed. Moreover, on a nominal daily salary of 4 Php per employee, the foreman takes 1,50 Php for himself as a commission. Finally, if Julio and the other construction workers have no place to live in Manila and wish to sleep in the construction site, they can do so in exchange for yet another deduction from their salary.

It’s the end of the gold mining season and time for the workers to pack up and head home. Andres (Don Melvin Boongaling) and Paulo (Bart Guingona) wait in line to receive their payment while Baldomero (Nanding Josef) daynaps in his hammock. The lifelong friends cut a deal. Baldomero arranged their voyage to the jobsite for a portion of their pay. But come payday, Andres protests: His sister is sick and he needs to buy her medication. After their manager gets his cut and the Captain and Sergeant who overlook their bayan each extort theirs, he won’t have enough money […]...

It’s the end of the gold mining season and time for the workers to pack up and head home. Andres (Don Melvin Boongaling) and Paulo (Bart Guingona) wait in line to receive their payment while Baldomero (Nanding Josef) daynaps in his hammock. The lifelong friends cut a deal. Baldomero arranged their voyage to the jobsite for a portion of their pay. But come payday, Andres protests: His sister is sick and he needs to buy her medication. After their manager gets his cut and the Captain and Sergeant who overlook their bayan each extort theirs, he won’t have enough money […]...

Lav Diaz's Season of the Devil, which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from July 30 – August 28, 2019 in Mubi's Luminaries series.A supremely powerful 4-hour lament for human suffering, Lav Diaz's Season of the Devil was clearly the token “hardcore” art-house movie in the competition section of the Berlin International Film Festival, where it premiered. But the Filipino director's reputation for difficulty—very long movies, long scenes done in long takes—is a misnomer: the challenge of Lav’s films aren’t their length, which can be relaxed into, or their languor, which allows for both inattention and contemplation. The challenge they raise are for a Philippine history unrecorded and perhaps even unwritten in the official records. It is a challenge to the once-seen but now-unsaid—and a challenge to those in power. Season of the Devil states: “This happened, look at it, experience it...

“These are my friends. And this is a tribute and a memoriam to them.”

The cinema of Filipino director Lav Diaz has always been about time, its essence as well as its way to define people and their surroundings. Considering the average length of one of his films varying between four to ten hours, Diaz has repeatedly abandoned what is commonly known as mainstream cinema and popular conceptions of what cinema is. For authors such as Sascha Westphal, for example, Diaz is a director in the same tradition as Andrei Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr, but then again, even the attempt of categorizing films like “Norte – The End of History” (2013) or “The Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery” (2016) with the label “slow cinema” does not really fit with the kind of work Diaz has delivered throughout his career.

“Season of the Devil ” is screening at the 27th Art Film Fest Kosice

In a nutshell,...

“These are my friends. And this is a tribute and a memoriam to them.”

The cinema of Filipino director Lav Diaz has always been about time, its essence as well as its way to define people and their surroundings. Considering the average length of one of his films varying between four to ten hours, Diaz has repeatedly abandoned what is commonly known as mainstream cinema and popular conceptions of what cinema is. For authors such as Sascha Westphal, for example, Diaz is a director in the same tradition as Andrei Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr, but then again, even the attempt of categorizing films like “Norte – The End of History” (2013) or “The Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery” (2016) with the label “slow cinema” does not really fit with the kind of work Diaz has delivered throughout his career.

In a nutshell, “slow cinema” is most likely associated with a film’s running time,...

“These are my friends. And this is a tribute and a memoriam to them.”

The cinema of Filipino director Lav Diaz has always been about time, its essence as well as its way to define people and their surroundings. Considering the average length of one of his films varying between four to ten hours, Diaz has repeatedly abandoned what is commonly known as mainstream cinema and popular conceptions of what cinema is. For authors such as Sascha Westphal, for example, Diaz is a director in the same tradition as Andrei Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr, but then again, even the attempt of categorizing films like “Norte – The End of History” (2013) or “The Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery” (2016) with the label “slow cinema” does not really fit with the kind of work Diaz has delivered throughout his career.

In a nutshell, “slow cinema” is most likely associated with a film’s running time,...

Season of the DevilCan a completely grueling experience be worth the effort, the investment of time and self? In the case of An Elephant Sitting Still, the first film by the young Chinese novelist Hu Bo, we’re talking about a four-hour story of such constant despair that not a single moment of joy or literal ray of sunlight pierces its desperate drama. But it is most definitely worth the ordeal. This bleak opus is not only the first but also the last film by Hu Bo, who killed himself at the age of 29 after its completion. This desire of some for release from life's onslaught of sorrow, ill-luck, bad decisions and a lack of compassion or even superficial pleasure can be felt in every single brutal minute of this sprawling film.Initially, the despair is repulsive, not a glimpse but a full on plunge into the void. A gangster...

Following up his Golden Lion-winning drama The Woman Who Left, Lav Diaz is returning to Berlinale 2018 with his latest film, Ang Panahon ng Halimaw aka Season of the Devil. Described as an “anti-musical musical, a rock opera, that delves into mythology,” the first trailer has now arrived ahead of the premiere in competition later this month.

According to The National, the film features 33 songs composed by the Filipino director himself and the story, which takes place during former president Ferdinand Marcos’s military dictatorship, follows “a man whose wife has been abducted in their remote village.”

Starring Piolo Pascual, Shaina Magdayao, Pinky Amador, Bituin Escalante, Hazel Orencio, Joel Saracho, Bart Guingona, Angel Aquino, Lilit Reyes, and Don Melvin Boongaling, see the trailer below via CineMaldito.

Season of the Devil will premiere at Berlinale 2018.

Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince and Pernille Fischer Christensen’s Unga Astrid picked for Berlinale Special.

Source: Wiki Commons

Steven Soderbergh, José Padilha

Five more films have joined the main lieups of the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 15 - 25). A further six films have been selected for the programme of the Berlinale Special.

Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane will get an out of competition world premiere. It stars Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah and Juno Temple and was reportedly shot on iPhone.

Also premiering out of competition is José Padilha’s true story thriller 7 Days In Entebbe, starring Rosamund Pike, Daniel Brühl and Eddie Marsan.

New films from Lav Diaz and Alonso Ruizpalacios will play in competition.

Rupert Everett’s Oscar Wilde biopic The Happy Prince and Becoming Astrid by Pernille Fischer Christensen have been added to the Berlinale Special Gala section.

Read more: Robert Pattinson, Christian Petzold movies join Berlin Film Festival Competition

23 of the 24 titles...

Starting with the Spanish conquest of the Philippines in the mid-16th century, the country was under the colonial rule of four different foreign powers for nearly 400 years. Independence gave way to two decades of vicious dictatorship and a democracy severely compromised by corruption and extensive external influence. As a nation that encompasses a staggering number of ethnicities and languages, the Philippines’ centuries-long experience of oppression has engendered an enduring identity crisis. It’s this crisis that has brought forth the films of Lav Diaz. They are dedicated to an excavation of his country’s turbulent past in search of its identity; the simultaneously chimeric and vital nature of this endeavor constitutes the emancipatory dialectic that drives his cinema. Having addressed Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship from a variety of angles in several earlier features, Diaz turns his attention to the Philippine Revolution of 1896-97 with A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery,...