Death In The Land Of Encantos

a film by lav diaz. photos taken by laurel lee penaranda.

ADELA

“ A woman's whole life in a single day,
just one day - and in that day,
her whole life unfolds...”

-VIRGINIA WOOLF


Adela celebrates her eightieth birthday. She tries to treat it like a normal day- doing her daily chores and duties but she can’t hide her loneliness and how she longs for her family.

Starring:
Ms. Anita Linda

Also Starring:
Jason Abalos
Joem Bascon
Kenneth Ocampo
Arnold Reyes
Angeli Bayani
Cyra dela Cerna

Special Guest Appearances:
Iza Calzado
and
Ms. Perla Bautista

Executive Producers: Noel D. Ferrer and Adolfo Alix, Jr.
Line Producers: Arleen Cuevas
Associate Line Producer: Maxie Evangelista
Director of Photography: Albert Banzon
Production Manager: Rolly Palmes
Associate Director; Armando Reyes
Production Designers: Adolfo Alix, Jr. and Jerome Zamora
Written by Adolfo Alix, Jr. and Nick Joseph Olanka
Directed by Adolfo Alix, Jr.

Lav Diaz' "DEATH IN THE LAND OF ENCANTOS" at the Ateneo Art Gallery

Start:	May 7, '08
End:	May 21, '08
Location:	Ateneo Art Gallery

May 7, 2008
8:30am

"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."
-- Andrej Sprah, KINO!, Slovenia

"A masterpiece. No other word."
-- Jurij Meden, KINO!, Slovenia

"Kagadanan Sa Banwaan Ning Mga Engkanto (Death in the
Land of Encantos) is simply one great film, arguably
the greatest film of 2007. Allow me to complicate
things further, Kagadanan is not merely a great film,
it is possibly one of the greatest films about love
ever made."
-- Francis Cruz, Lessons from the School of
Inattention

"One of the ten greatest films of the last ten years."
-- Philip Cheah, cine21 magazine, Singapore
International Film Festival

"The best of 2007."
-- Michel Lipkes, FICCO Mexico

Poetic Post-mortem

By Nil Baskar

In the global film festival circuit, the screenings of
the works of the Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz have
become somewhat of a cinematic festivity in
themselves, a festivity of endurance, which brings
into being a certain sense of solidarity between the
viewers participating in such a banquet of cinema.

Demanding as they are, the works of Lav Diaz usually
present a challenge to the logic of film festivals â€"
for the most part a logic of consumption, where one
often feels that the new cinema is being hastily
processed and packed for further use. On such terms it
becomes excessively difficult to see films such as
Death in the Land of Encantos (Kagadanan sa banwaan
ning mga Engkanto, 2007) for what they really are â€"
a solitary beacon for an ethical cinema â€" and
increasingly easy to dismiss them with all kinds of
pretexts. The Ljubljana Film Festival thus certainly
deserves a cinephile salute for not shying away from
showing a nine-hour long film. However, the Slovenian
Cinematheque, where the screening took place, deserves
extreme admonishment: not only was the quality of the
screening substandard (one would think that a
state-subsidized pillar of film culture could afford
to maintain a decent digital projection system), but
the heating in the hall was turned off too, surely to
save at least some of the taxpayers' money.

Despite that, Death in the Land of Encantos proved to
be a wholly enchanting experience, both a lesson in
cinema's capacity to profoundly shape time and space,
as well as a rediscovery of its fundamental gestures,
of conceiving and associating images with true
artistic and political necessities. It confirmed that
the work of Lav Diaz is not unique because of its epic
length, but because of its original ideas and its
confidence in telling a story with purely cinematic
means â€" something that is becoming quite rare and
even strange to observe in these times, when it seems
that so much of contemporary cinema has elected a
noncommittal and ironic detachment from everything and
anything. Diaz's cinema, in contrast, is radically
non-ironic (at least in the post-modern sense of
irony, that is), committed and attached â€" perhaps
even too attached: all of its many people, things,
moments, ideas are equally important, all of them
constitute an image of a world. This attachment is not
driven by any kind of grandeur, but is merely an
attempt to narrate in a dialectical way.

Diaz conceived the film as a document in the aftermath
of the apocalyptic disaster that hit the Bicol region
in 2006, where he had previously shot most parts of
Evolution of a Filipino Family (Ebolusyon ng isang
pamilyang pilipino, 2004) and Heremias (2006). After
typhoon Reming devastated the area â€" including the
town of Padang, where the film takes place â€" a
mudslide from the volcano Mayon followed, burying
whole parts of the town together with its inhabitants.
However, little of the documentary footage â€" mostly
interviews with some of the survivors â€" remains in
the final film. In the face of destruction and atop of
the ruins, a distinctly poetic voice is introduced to
reflect on the disappearance and the pain. This is the
fictitious character of the "great Filipino poet
Benjamin Agusan", who returns after years of artistic
exile to find his home gone, together with his family
and his lover. What remains is a desolate, featureless
ground-zero landscape, infused by the ghosts of the
dead and dominated by the perfectly shaped volcano â€"
a sublime appearance, both inspiring and menacing.

When Benjamin meets his old friends â€" poet Teodoro
and sculptor/painter Catalina â€" this new landscape
is slowly becoming repopulated. Memories, some
comforting, others traumatic, are excavated, often
without a clear demarcation between the past and the
present. Take, for instance, the agonizing final shot
of Benjamin being tortured by a secret police agent:
is this a recollection of a past event, already
alluded to, or is this the actual present of the film,
the final scene of Benjamin's life, perhaps his
execution? What seems clear is Diaz telling us that
the executions of the Filipino political activists
cannot be relegated to any kind of history, least of
all because they are (still) happening right now (to a
shocking extent, as we learn). While Nature's wrath is
something we can ultimately deal with, the suppression
of freedom, thought and art cannot but remain
unresolved. This is the essence of Diaz's
"non-reconciled cinema"; a refusal to surrender
memories to a history, to detach any moment or body
from its place in time or space.
Benjamin's wandering, rootless protagonist, haunted by
memories and traumas, is, of course, a familiar figure
in Diaz's oeuvre: in Batang West Side (2001) it is
shared by both the detective and the murdered youth;
it is the moving part of Evolution and a subject of
intense examination in Heremias. Lost in their
quixotic search for truth and redemption, these
figures also belong to a distinct tradition of the
silent and often mad philosopher, a kind of a
premodern somnambulist, which goes about the land
forgetting and remembering. The poet-philosopher of
Death, however, breaks this silent spell, speaking and
thinking aloud, to whomever wants to listen. There is
a sort of an ongoing conversation â€" a discurso, as
we learn it is called, quite appropriately â€" between
Benjamin and his two friends, an often impassioned
exchange on art, politics, culture, modern life and
the world at large. Immediate and imperfect â€" as any
conversation between good friends usually is (awkward,
even naïve, rarely teleological in a narrative sense)
â€" it also suggests something about Diaz's cinema
itself, about the way it seems to come together as an
inspired and generous reflection on art and life. Such
sincerity of film-making and film-thinking is what
makes Death â€" despite its existential gravity â€"
the most outwardly dialogical of all the films Diaz
has made.

Clearly, Diaz has allowed much of himself to enter the
film (in some of the interviews he can be heard
off-screen, explaining the film he is shooting), but
this intrusion of the camera and the director isn't
simply about detaching cinema from spectacle. In
truth, there is no fiction and reality here, but more
of a weaving of determined and potential realities, of
vérité and fausseté, always with a natural,
sometimes even prodigious ease. In one of the
interviews, for instance, we encounter an actor from
the second part of Heremias, whose character in the
film â€" a prophet â€" warns against a disaster. His
prediction, coming from a film which paradoxically
isn't finished yet, is uncanny to say the least, more
so since in reality he has lost everything except his
life. Is this intrusion â€" from a film that is both
past and future â€" a proof that cinema is somehow
prophetic, or is it merely capable of detecting the
future, already contained in the present? This
ambiguity, a question whether detecting doesn't also
mean rendering a certain (catastrophic) reality
visible and thus possible, haunts the film; and while
it cannot be answered, it can be at least re-imagined
as a symbolic gesture. As examples, one can think of
two of the most moving shots in the film â€" Catalina
reading Benjamin's poem-testament for the camera, and
her once more, painting and burning a portrait
(presumably his). Both of these are rituals of
remembrance and redemption, but also a spectacle, a
staging of creation and destruction (much like Nature
itself stages it, of course). A way of saying that
there is no art without the spectacle of art.

Ultimately, one could hardly exhaust Death by only
revisiting its symbolic concerns and suggestions. Much
should be said about Diaz's mastery in visual
composition and his use of black and white images,
about the shades of grey which preserve the
encountered world in a distinctly physical, voluminous
way; also about his use of natural low-key light,
which, ordered into digital textures, produces
distinctly material aesthetics. One that bears traces
of both the scarcity of its means as well as the
urgency of its ideas â€" a digital liberation
theology, as Diaz calls it himself. More could also be
said how a work like this renders so much of
contemporary cinema obsolete, immature or hardly
substantial. The hours of pure cinema it has to offer
are hours that matter most: they are the time of
cinema in becoming, being thought, reclaiming its
space, time and subjects.

Nil Baskar© FIPRESCI 2007

-----

(6 regular runs, open to special request according to Gallery and
facility/personnel availability)

May 7, 2008
8:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
1:30 p.m. - 6:45 p.m.

May 21, 2008
8:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
1:30 p.m. - 6:45 p.m.