"DEATH IN THE LAND OF ENCANTOS" - Reviews/Words/Film Comment from Slovenia, Venice

Lav Diaz's latest film, “Kagadanan sa Banwaan ning mga Engkanto” (Death in the Land of Encantos), winner of Orizzonti—Special Mention Award, the first Filipino film to bag a Mostra (Venice) prize.

Venice Film Festival (In Competition and Closing Film—Orizzonti) , Toronto International Film Festival (In Competition—Visions) , Ljubljana International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival 2008, Hong Kong International Film Festival 2008, Singapore International Film Festival 2008, FICCO 2008, Cinema du reel 2008 (part of a tribute to Lav Diaz)

Here are reviews and words of previous screenings in Venice and Slovenia .


From Slovenia (18th Ljubljana International Film Festival)

Danièle Huillet once notoriously remarked that cinephilia is also a lack of ambition. Presumably also with that warning in mind, Serge Daney later in his career as a film thinker redefined cinephilia (as it should be) as not just a relation to cinema, but a relation to the world through cinema. Cinema as perhaps the most complex and yet still straightforward means of human expression to understand or at least most accurately describe all the moral, social, political and aesthetical complexities of the worlds we inhabit and – more importantly – share. And it is with this understanding in mind that one should first approach and later ponder on Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga Engkanto, the latest masterpiece (there really isn't any other word) by Lav Diaz, that most honest, hard working, heart wrenching, eye stunning and thought inspiring filmmaker at work today. Watching Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga Engkanto thus surpasses a "mere" (nevertheless still absolutely unique) experience of cinema and becomes a fully fledged experience of life, an almost unbelievably sincere and courageous exploration into the heart of three grand existential matters: the meaning of love, the importance of hope, the redemptive power of art. All things of beauty--in a film of terrible beauty…

- - Jurij Meden, film critic, editor/Kino Magazine , Slovenia

Every new film signed by Lav Diaz means a celebration of film (as) art. In his latest adventure of images, gazes and words, Death in the Land of Encantos, he strokes again with enormous artistic power and unsurpassable poetic vision. He proved once more that art as such, irrespective of form it takes to realize its ideas, can be as dangerous weapon as any kind of firearms to fight against the terror of all kinds of oppression. His unique film expression, in which he took another large step forward to a new direction, is kind of experience that overshadowed great deal of filmmaking since Heremias. I can see or rather feel Death in the Land of Encantos as an invaluable gift, which will stay with me for a long time. At least because I'll be able to break trough all of the layers of its complex structure and countless meanings. Until then I'll enjoy the flashes of memories of this precious hours in film theatre, which flew too fast despite the contemplative rhythm of the narrative. Thus I could only reveal a deep debt of gratitude to get the chance to participate in such unique act of creativity and artistic responsibility.

- - Andrej Šprah, film publicist and writer from Ljubljana , author of several articles about Lav Diaz in Slovenia .

Nine hours were hardly enough. This experience was not just any kind of film experience. It could last 24 hours and it still wouldn't be enough. Because the story leads us into the land of prodigious thoughts, sometimes from everyday life, and rises up to the level of philosophy; in both instances, we were merged with ideas through elevated storytelling, which we are ravenously hungry of.

-- Petra Slatinšek , Slovenia


From Venice screening

Variety Review:

Lav Diaz's latest black-and-white digital marathon, "Death in the Land of Encantos " (clocking in at nine hours), unfolds in the devastated landscape left in the wake of Super Typhoon Durian, the worst storm to hit the Philippines in living memory. Placing a threesome of fictional characters amid the rubble, Diaz measures the aftermath of this natural disaster within the larger trauma of the islands' history. Plunging the viewer into an alternate time zone where distinctions between documentary and fiction, stasis and action slowly dissolve, pic confirms helmer's status as a brilliant but consummately non-commercial artist.

Unlike Diaz's other works, which were carefully constructed over time ("Evolution of a Filipino Family" was nine years in the making -- and 10 hours in the viewing), "Death" sprang fully grown from the ravages of the typhoon in Bicol, where Diaz had lensed several previous films. Thus, the documentary elements could not be described as "interpolated, " but rather form the very clay from which the drama (if such slight strands of narrative can be so termed) is molded.

Pic, with its themes of art and madness, is headlined with a quote from Rilke: "Beauty is the beginning of terror." Indeed, the region's Mayon Volcano -- which, under the onslaught of the storm, poured out mountains of rocks and debris, killed hundreds and buried whole towns -- remains one of the most majestic, perfectly cone-shaped structures in nature.

Pic traces fictional famed poet Benjamin Agusan (Roeder Camanag), newly returned to the Philippines from a lengthy stint in Russia . Two of his lifelong friends, a painter/sculptress (Angeli Bayani) and a fellow-poet turned farmer/paterfamilias (Perry Dizon) welcome Agusan home, and the trio starts to hang out together. The three, like everyone in the obliterated village of Padang , lost several close relatives to the natural calamity.

Specters from the past haunt the poet, including images of a beautiful naked woman who turns out to be the girlfriend he left behind who is now interred in his old studio lying somewhere beneath his feet.

Other visions haunting the poet are less explicable, like the nondescript street where the viewer finds himself stranded for stretches as Agusan stalks the Russian woman who left him after their child died. More disturbing still are scenes of his mother's psychotic breakdown and his father's desperate attempts to drive out the evil spirits with loops of twisted wire hung from trees. Madness stalks Agustan, as death and desolation lie over the land, the nude topmost branches of trees sticking up out of the ground where lush foliage once flourished. Diaz's stark black-and-white digital compositions frame a landscape so bleak and boulder-strewn, so empty of habitation that it is hard to believe the land was not barren from time primordial. Painful flashbacks to the region's past resurrect a lost Eden . The only thing more shocking than the extent of the damage is the ages-deep acceptance in the eyes of the survivors.

- -Ronnie Schieb, Variety, http://www.variety. com/review/ VE1117934956. html?categoryid= 31&cs=1


Film Comment:

There remains but one film to celebrate, among the greatest in Venice , and certainly the longest at nine-plus hours: Lav Diaz's monumental memoir to suffering, Death in the Land of Encantos , a modern mosaic cobbled together from the modest of means. In 2006, a typhoon devastated the region of the Philippines where Diaz shot much of his last two works--so the filmmaker went back and began filming, although with no clear game plan. Eventually he developed a narrative about a generation broken by their country's seemingly inescapable corruption: an assortment of the living dead wandering a landscape filled with the grief-stricken. Diaz's protagonist is yet another of the festival's schizophrenics, and manic-depressive in the bargain.

As in his 2005 Evolution of a Filipino Family, the filmmaker creates a massive tapestry, here incorporating documentary footage of typhoon survivor speaking out about government's neglect of their plight, as well as fragments from an unfinished short horror film shot in Zagreb in 2003. The latter concerns a lost tribe of Aswangs--ghouls of popular Philippine folklore--who have found a home in southeastern Europe . Little if anything at the Lido was as emotionally exhausting and exhaustive, as rich an experience and as crushing as Diaz's film.

-- Olaf Moller, Film Comment Magazine November-December 2007