The 10 Best Filipino Independent Films for 2008

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The 10 Best Filipino Independent Films for 2008

The Young Filmmakers of the Philippines (YFMP), a group of young filmmakers from different colleges and universities names the 10 best Filipino independent films for 2007. Our criteria for selecting the best films are the quality of the screenplay and the subject matter. We look for something new. The script should be somewhat unconventional and unpredictable. The film depicts Filipino historical and/or cultural values and exemplified artistry, creativity, technical excellence, innovativeness and thematic values.

Also acknowledged were Filipino independent Filmmakers through hard work and dedication filmmakers have proven that this country, which was once a filmic cul-de-sac, when given the right opportunity, now produces some of the world's finest films, responsive to the genuine needs and aspirations of its people.

YFMP announced the 10 Best Filipino Independent Films (in alphabetical order)
by Donna Villanueva

In Alphabetical Order:

1.  Ala Swerte Ala Muerte 2007

Cast: Ana Capri, Maris Dimayuga, Perry Escaño and Menggie Cobbarubias

Director: Briccio Santos

Screenwriter: Jorge Arago, Briccio Santos

Cinematographer: Steve Sagun, Briccio Santos

Editor: Anil Rao

Festival: 9^th Cinemanila Fim Festival Finalist,

Winner Best Actress  Ana Capri & Maris Dimayuga

Synopsis :

Jessica is a young widowwith a four-year-old son, Manolito, who lives with her in a crowded boarding house. They share a room with Linda, who dreams of being released from bondage to poverty by getting paid in dollars as an overseas contract worker in Europe , but who is desperately looking for work in the city in the meantime. This situation conveniently provides Jessica with an amah, to free her for work and not have to be shackled to the chores created by an only child's growing up pains. When the boy disappears one day whilst under Linda's care, the world starts to collapse for both Jessicand Linda. The mother's longing for a son who has disappeared from view, carrying only his late father's name. Such is the fate the mother and child has to endure.

 

2. Confessional

Cast: Publio Briones III, David Barril, Greg Fernandez, Owee Salva, Donna Gimeno

Director: Jerold Tarog and Ruel Dahis Antipuesto

Screenwriter: Ramon Ukit

Cinematographer: Ruel Dahis Antipuesto

Editor: Pats Ranyo

Music Jerold Tarog with Arodasi

Winner: 2007 Cinema One Best Picture, Best Screenplay,Best Sound, Best Editing, Best Supporting Actors, Star Cinema Special Award

Ryan Pastor knows this by heart. As a small time filmmaker, he knows howsound and images can be manipulated to say anything. And he's tired of the lies—the lies at work, in his relationships, the lies one must keep in society just to exist. On a whim, he decides to go to Cebu to document the Sinulog festival. There he stumbles upon a truth he didn't ask for and is reluctant to touch. One of his subjects, a former politician who may or may not be dying, decides to confess his sins—all the crimes he committed while in office—before Ryan’s Camera,that follows is a story of revelations and bitter truths, of buried secrets and sweet lies. CONFESSIONAL takes you to the heart of a criminal...or an honest man.

 

3. Death in the Land of Encantos

Cast: Roeder Camañag, Perry Dizon, Kalila Aguilos and Angeli Bayani

Director: Lav Diaz

      Screenwriter: Lav Diaz

      Cinematographer: Lav Diaz

      Editor: Lav Diaz

      Music: Lav Diaz

     Production Design: Lav Diaz & Dante Perez

Festival:

   2007 Venice Film Festival

   Winner Venice Horizons Award Special Mention

    2008 YCC Winner Best Achievement in Cinematography and Visual Design
   YCC Winner in Production Design      

 Synopsis:

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.

 

4. Endo

Cast: Ina Feleo, Jason Abalos, Alcris Galura & Ricky Davao

Director: Jade Castro

      Screenwriter: Michiko Yamamoto  & Raymond Lee

      Cinematographer: Wowie Hao

      Editor: J.D. Domingo

      Music: Owel Alvero

      Production Design:  Jhek Cogama

Festival:

Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival Finalist

Winner Best Actress & Special Jury Prize Feature Length

Golden Screen Awards, Philippines

Winner Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role

Young Critics Circle, Philippines

Winner Best Achievement in Film Editing, Best Achievement in Sound and Aural Orchestration & Best Performance by Male or Female, Adult or Child, Individual or Ensemble in Leading or Supporting Role

 

      

5. Foster Child

Cast: Cherry Pie Picache, Eugene Domingo, Dan Alvaro and Jiro Manio

Director: Brilliante Mendoza

      Screenwriter: Joel Jover & Ralston Jover

      Cinematographer: Odyssey Flores

      Editor: Charliebebs Gohetia 

      Music: Jerrold Tarog

      Production Design: Benjamin Padero

Festival:

 Winner 2008 Golden Screen Award Best Performance by an Actress in a Lead Role 

 Winner Las Palmas Film Festival SIGNIS Award

 Winner Young Critics Circle, Philippines Best Film and Best Screenplay

Synopsis:

          A drama centered on the state of foster care in the Philippines.

 

6. Haw-Ang

 Cast: Kalila Aguilos, Neil Ryan Sese, Racquel Reyes & Dacmay Tangliban

Director: Bong Ramos

      Screenwriter: Bong Ramos

      Cinematographer: Vincent Paul Pangan 

      Editor: Rona Lean Sales

Synopsis:

Set in the majestic rice terraces, Haw-Ang (English title: Before Harvest) is an indie film advocating children's right to quality education, empowerment of women, and welfare of our indigenous countrymen. It tells the story of Sister Adel, a light-hearted young nun who goes to a farming village in Ifugao to teach catechism and eventually build a schoolhouse. As she breaks the traditions of the tribe, she makes a big difference in the little lives of its people, especially that of Dacmay, a seven-year-old rowdy girl in search of her lost mother's love. At the same time, Sister Adel finally discovers her real mission in life. This is a poignant story of friendship and love that transcends age, culture, and belief. A tale that is at times comic and inevitably tragic, this is a film about being a woman, and more importantly, being human. It all begins at the time of preparing rice paddies for planting, in that season of hopes and dreams called "haw-ang."

 

7. Kadin

Cast: Monica Joy Camarillas, Rico Mark Cardona, Florencia Cardona

Director: Adolfo Alix Jr.

      Screenwriter: Adolfo Alix Jr. 

      Cinematographer: Rodolfo Aves Jr.

      Editor: Aleks Castañeda 

      Music: Jerrold Tarog

     Production Design: Herwin Alfaro

Festival:

2007 Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival Finalist

Winner Best Cinematography & Best Original Music Score

Winner Golden Screen Awards, Philippines Best Sound

Synopsis:

Peping wakes up to find out that Gima, their goat, is missing. His family make a living out of the milk provided the goat. He hides the truth from his grandmother. His father is also arriving the next day so he needs to find Gima before its too late. Together with his younger sister, Lita, the two go on a seemingly impossible search for the goat in the landscape of the island of Sabtang , in Batanes. A series of frustrating episodes mark the day, tension and desperation growing as natural and human forces conspire to frustrate them at every turn. The odyssey teaches the boy about the true meaning of life- where kindness and cruelty can be found in close proximity.

 

8. Pisay

Cast: Eugene Domingo, Arnold Reyes, Elijah Castillo & Carl John Barrameda

Director: Auraeus Solito 

      Screenwriter:  Auraeus Solito  & Henry Grageda

       Cinematographer: Charlie Peralta

      Editor: Mikael Pestaño  & Auraeus Solito 

     Music: Jobin Ballesteros  Irwin Cafugauan  Vincent de Jesus 

     Production Design: Endi Balbuena , Dante Nico Garcia , Martin Masadao ,

                                    Reggie Regalado

Festival:

Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival Finalist

Winner Best Feature Length & Best Director (Feature Length)

Golden Screen Awards, Philippines

Winner Best Director, Best Editing, Best Motion Picture, Best Musical Score, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Song, Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role & Best Production Design

2008 Vesoul Asian Film Festival

Winner Audience Award & Grand Prize of the International Jury

Synopsis:

Amidst the chaos of Martial Law in this Third World country in the 1980s, six teenagers in the top high school for the sciences discover themselves as they go through the joys and pains of adolescence. They were the top two hundred students from all over the Philippines who passed the examination for the Philippine Science High School, which was created for the purpose of giving an education highly enriched in the Sciences to exceptionally gifted Filipino children. Selected from the best and brightest from all over the country, they endure college-level courses in biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics from their sophomore year onwards. Those who can make it are hailed as the future science and technology leaders of the New Republic, those who don't are deemed unfortunate victims of natural selection. They all learn however that they are neither isolated from the real world, nor are they exempted from living real lives. They find the world outside, erupting into the People Power revolution in 1986 against the Marcos dictatorship, being replicated within the school as they struggle to graduate, contend with teachers, classmates, family, school officials, and a new classification to segregate students meeting the high standards of excellence from those who do not.

 

 

9. Tirador

Cast: Jacklyn Jose, Nathan Lopez, Jiro Manio, Coco Martin & Julio Diaz

Director: Brillante Mendoza

      Screenwriter:  Ralston Jover

      Cinematographer: Jeffrey Dela Cruz,  Gary Tria &  Julius Villanueva

      Editor: Charliebebs Gohetia 

      Music: Teresa Barrozo

      Production Deisgn: Harley Alcasid  Deans Habal

Festival:

2008 Berlin International Film Festival Winner Caligari Film Award

2007 Marrakech International Film Festival Winner Special Jury Award

2008 Singapore International Film Festival FIPRESCI/NETPAC & Silver Screen Award

Synopsis:

 

10. Tribu

Cast: Havy Bagatsing, Karl Eigger Balingit,Honey Concepcion & Mhalouh Crisologo

Director: Jim Libiran

      Screenwriter:  Jim Libiran

      Cinematographer: Albert Banzon

      Editor: Lawrence Ang 

      Music: Francis de Veyra 

      Production Deisgn: Armi Cacanindin

Festival:

Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival

Winner Best Actor & Best Film

Cinemanila International Film Festival

Winner Best Ensemble

Synopsis:

Every night, juvenile tribes prowl the streets of Tondo. An explosive hiphop, freestyle gangsta celebration of inner city Manila

Lav Diaz's DEATH IN THE LAND OF ENCANTOS

Start:	Jul 19, '08 10:00a
Location:	Tanghalang Huseng Batute, Cultural Center of the Philippines

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 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: a solitary beacon for an ethical cinema — 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 an 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 — 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 — 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 — including the town of Padang, where the film takes place — a mudslide from the volcano Mayon followed, burying whole parts of the town together with its inhabitants.
However, little of the documentary footage — mostly interviews with some of the survivors — 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 — a sublime appearance, both inspiring and menacing.
When Benjamin meets his old friends — poet Teodoro and sculptor/painter Catalina — 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 — a discurso, as we learn it is called, quite appropriately — between
Benjamin and his two friends, an often impassioned exchange on art, politics, culture, modern life and the world at large. Immediate and imperfect — as any conversation between good friends usually is (awkward, even naïve, rarely teleological in a narrative sense)
— 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 — despite its existential gravity — 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 — a prophet — 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 — from a film that is both past and future — 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 — 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 — 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

21st Singapore International Film Festival

http://www.filmfest.org.sg/asian-cinema.php
Death in the Land of Encantos
Lav Diaz | The Philippines | 2007 | 540 mins | R21

“Beauty is the beginning of terror.” This epigraph by Rainer Maria Rilke forms the premise for this nine-hour opus by Filipino director Lav Diaz. Shot in response to the devastation of the eastern Bicol region of the Philippines by Super Typhoon Durian, Death In The Land of Encantos meditates on the fragility of life and the regenerative power of both nature and art.

An acclaimed Filipino poet named Benjamin Agusan (Roeder Camanag) returns from Russia to his hometown of Padang, to find it buried under landslides of mud and a nascent river. Shocked, he wanders through the ravaged land, reconnecting with distraught friends, lovers and family members.

The stark black and white images of barren trees and rocks paint a bleak and disturbing landscape of loss. Yet Diaz surprises the audience by strategically cutting from these harsh images to quiet scenes of physical and emotional intimacy between characters, expressing a belief in the natural rhythms of life.

Death In The Land of Encantos was awarded a Special Mention in the Orizzonti (Horizons) Documentary Section of the Venice Film Festival in 2007.

Production Company / World Sales:
Produksyung Sine Olivia
11A Mirasol Townhomes, Mirasol Street, Cubao, Quezon City, Metro Manila, The Philippines.
Tel: (63-9) 2023-14708


6 April | 11:00:00 | The Substation
11 April | 10:30:00 | Republic Polytechnic

Death In The Land Of Encantos

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

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.

DEATH IN THE LAND OF ENCANTOS in Angono

Start:	Feb 15, '08 8:00p
End:	Feb 16, '08 05:00a
Location:	Metrobank fronting the Municipal hall, Angono, Rizal

The Cinema Committee of the NCCA, in cooperation with the Neo-Angono
Artists Coalition presents:

DEATH IN THE LAND OF ENCANTOS, directed by
Lav Diaz (special award, Venice film festival, 2007), Feb 15-16, 8pm-
5am, Metrobank fronting the Municipal hall, Angono, Rizal.

An Informal Discussion with Dir. Lav Diaz will begin at 7pm.

This program is part of the National Arts Month.

For details, directions, ect, contact Kints:09052404177

Oggs Cruz' review of "DEATH IN THE LAND OF ENCANTOS"

Kagadanan Sa Banwaan Ning Mga Engkanto (Lav Diaz, 2007)
English Title: Death in the Land of Encantos

"Great" is an adjective that is usually reserved for works of considerable degree and power, of immense import and significance. To the very few in the world who are open-minded enough to have braved sitting through Lav Diaz's latest nine-hour opus, the term "great" would be the proper and popular adjective to describe the film. I cannot disagree, 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. The love that subtly illuminates Diaz's black and white visual aesthetics over acres of land ravaged by the typhoon Reming (internationally referred to as Durian, the strongest typhoon to have ever hit the Bicol region, wiping out entire families and towns) is expansive. The love here is utterly romantic, blatantly destructive, hypnotically alluring, and fascinatingly sincere.

Kagadanan takes its cue from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novels (like One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera), where the men and women are all hopelessly romantic scavengers, traversing the Latin American wasteland of fractured colonial and political influences with gentle caresses of native magic and coincidences. Diaz evokes Garcia Marquez by draping the return of Bicolano poet Benjamin Agusan Jr. (played by theater actor Roeder Camanag), fondly referred to by his friends as Hamin, to his now desolate home town with the same overbearing atmosphere of a country completely collapsing from the burden of colonial influence and present political inutility. Diaz furthers this contemplation with a subplot involving memories of Hamin's mother (Gemma Cuenca), suffering supposedly from insanity caused by her romantic affair with an earth spirit castled in a mound of soil in their farmland. Insanity becomes a generational ill as Hamin himself is slowly degenerating into a rabid paranoid, consumed by a similar doomed love affair. All the other characters in Kagadanan suffer a similar fate, of being swallowed completely by an indefatigable obsession, an incurable enchantment of the land that Diaz pictures as insufferably beautiful yet compulsively treacherous. This is where Diaz tops Garcia Marquez. Diaz's magic realism is more familiar, more agonizing, more a product of a collective national experience than a singular imaginative mind.

Hamin meets up with his friends, Teodoro (Perry Dizon), another poet who has retired to become a fisherman, and Catalina (Angeli Bayani), sculptor of rocks spewed by Mt. Mayon and Hamin's former flame and mother of his kid. The three would indulge in prolonged conversations about neverendingly evolving topics (an evening conversation between the three friends would begin with a question about the severe blackout evolves into a complaint about kerosene lamps which evolves into a discussion on insects and their intriguing behavioral patterns which then evolves into musings about the government, about art, about passion and mysteries) over bottles of beer. These conversations distinguish the characters. Hamin is the romantic intellectual, experienced with the ways of the world (having been to Europe and Russia), yet secretive and guarded. Teodoro, on the other hand, has the temperament of a simple provincial laborer, unflinchingly loyal and beholden to his more successful friends (upon first sight of Hamin, he devotes a persuasive recital of a fondly remembered poem, lovingly and graciously delivered), yet his restraint is his wisdom. Catalina has a worldly demeanor which shrouds her maternal inclinations to both her friends. She is supposedly the most level-headed of the three, but she is fueled by emotions. Her art, carving from volcanic boulders valuable pieces, is a derivative of her passionate hatred for Mt. Mayon.

Although the friends are very close, there's an indescribable tension that overpowers their bonds. Between Hamin and Teodoro lies an uncomfortable merging of respect, disdain, and the acknowledgment that both of them have something the other will never have (Hamin's experiences abroad and acclaim, and Teodoro's comfort and stability). Hamin and Catalina share a son and a past romantic relationship, yet both of them are not in a position to give in to the simple comforts Teodoro has retired to. Both of them are fervent artists and activists who are unable and probably will never be able to descend to lowly concerns of plebeian livelihood and family. Sacrifice, that is the affliction that pervades the nine-hour picture. It is an affliction that resembles an unhealthy obsession, an interval of insanity, essentially leading to death.

Amalia (Sophia Aves), Hamin's lover who he abandoned when he for Russia, is peacefully sleeping naked. Hamin's voice-over is heard "You're the most beautiful" as Diaz's camera peers into every exposed area of Amalia's body. There's a faint echo of despair in Hamin's voice, as if he's trapped in a moment where he is deprived of fully enjoying the beauty that he is beholden to, unable to touch and embrace. In another similar scene, Svita, Hamin's lover while he was stationed in Russia, is peacefully sleeping naked. Again, Hamin's voice is heard declaring that Svita is "the most beautiful" with the same faint echo of despair while the camera peers into every exposed area of her body. These scenes (I'd think of them as vivid dream sequences that are laced with erotic motivations rather than memories of events that ensued) are always preceded or followed by visual meditations of the ruined land, of the majestic and perfectly coned Mt. Mayon and its terrible power, hinting of the indispensable connection between the love for a beautiful woman that has been left or has left, and the love for this beautiful yet wretched country that is slowly turning into a literal hell.

Within the nine-hour duration of Kagadanan are several filmed interviews (with Diaz doing the interviewing himself in a mannered and very journalistic method, eliciting answers and stories of considerable power and drama) of the survivors of the typhoon Reming. Depicted are the unthinkable horrors that ensued: of mothers persisting to dig up the bodies of their families, of entire towns being submerged in mixtures of water and volcanic mud, of both past and future livelihoods lost in a short period of time. More harrowing are the different reactions of the victims: an old woman suddenly wails when she is reminded of her uncertain future, a group of friends nonchalantly discuss friends who were buried underneath the rubble, a woman correlates the tragedy with the residents' worsening sinfulness. Diaz then plays around with form when he also interviews the three main characters as similar victims of the typhoon's catastrophe. The interviewer all of a sudden becomes part of the film, engaging in conversations and arguments with Hamin, Catalina and Teodoro. Diaz pierces the veil that divides fiction and documentary (the film got a special mention in Venice in the documentary section of the Horizons sidebar of the film festival), yet despite the use of such device, no intention of mockery or gimmickry is perceived. Instead, the blurred lines become drastic ruminations of the blatant absurdity of the very real situation: of an entire population wiped out and forced to evacuate, of a nation and government that simply does not care.

Kagadanan is possibly Diaz's most personal film. Unlike in Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family, 2001) or Heremias (2006) where static long takes have become the comforting norm of Diaz's visual aesthetics, Kagadanan is more dynamic. While the contemplative long takes are still present, Diaz frequently engages in hand held shots especially in the scenes that are supposedly from the point of view of Hamin, like the first scene where we become accustomed in the muddied desolation caused by the typhoon, the several scenes wherein Hamin reminisces on his childhood, and the dream sequences with Amalia and Svita. The peculiar thing about this change in Diaz's aesthetics is that from mere observer in Ebolusyon and Heremias, he now partakes a more involved role, becoming Hamin if necessary (this is why Hamin's gaze on the female form is so complex (lustful, eager, curious and longing), because Diaz himself becomes Hamin). The evening banters and the philosophical musings are all Diaz's; a conversation with the director would feel like the humble discussions between Hamin, Catalina and Teodoro (only in that case, it's all Diaz in different personas doing the talking). The poems made and recited by both Hamin and Teodoro are also in reality, Diaz's.

Diaz is a very generous artist, too generous perhaps. Unfortunately, the naked sincerity and generosity in Diaz's filmmaking are often mistaken for self-indulgence, mostly because of his film's ungodly lengths. The sacrifices he has made for the love of his art is unsurpassed by any Filipino filmmaker, living or dead. The reason why the heartaches, the unbridled longings, the closeted insecurities, the disregarded relationships, the incomparable dedication for art and activism, the emotional and physical desolation are so palpable in Kagadanan, which I believe is Diaz's most personal film, is because they were cultivated not from manufactured imagination but through collected experiences.

"Ang mamatay ng dahil sa iyo" (translated as "To die for you"), from the Philippine national anthem sung with a rough and insulting baritone by a mysterious military officer (played with cartoonish viciousness by Soliman Cruz) while torturing Hamin, are the last words heard in the film before the images abruptly turn to black and the end credits start appearing. The way the words were sung connotes a harsh taunting, probably from the government forces to those whose activism is similar to Hamin's (and this part is rooted from a valid concern by most artists and journalists whose works are either censored because of its political messages or they themselves are mysteriously executed). The words also candidly express the affliction of sacrifice that has become the norm in such manner of living Diaz's characters and perhaps Diaz himself live. There can be no mistress for one's unmitigated love (or art) for the land despite its frequent treacherous ways, which is why Hamin can never fulfill the desires of consummating love with his women (Amalia, whom he left; Svita, who left him; and Catalina, who can never arouse him again), or inhabiting the role of father to his estranged son in Mindanao, or to give aid to his family members who all died in fits of insanity before him. That in itself is a maddening preoccupation, and the logical although painful recourse is to escape by consummating one's mortality. In this ravaged land of both magic and extreme reality, death is a cheap comfort.

******
This review is also published in The Oblation, and is also my contribution to the Contemplative Cinema Blog-a-Thon at Unspoken Cinema.

"Death in the Land of Encantos" in Cinema Scope Magazine

Death in the Land of Encantos (Lav Diaz, The Philippines)

By Robert Koehler

Time, it’s on Lav Diaz’s side. “Malay time,” he said after the Toronto screening of his nine-hour-and-five-minute Death in the Land of Encantos. “I’m a Malay as much—maybe more—than I am a Filipino. We Malays are governed more by space and nature than conventional time.” What underlies the shattering and disturbing reality of Diaz’s new work is a stunning 2006 catastrophe: nature, in the form of the profoundly devastating Super Typhoon Durian, combined with the explosive power of the Mayon volcano, wiped out physical space—the Bicol region on the central island of Luzon—along with thousands of innocents. In the face of this, and in the experience of watching Death in the Land of Encantos from beginning to end, time itself dissolves. In fact, Diaz controls the sense of time to such a degree that it no longer matters. In his hands, we all become Malay.

This is just one of the paradoxes to ponder about Diaz’s cinema, which has helped frame—though not imperiously define—the new independent Filipino cinema over the past decade. In a group of relative youngsters, Diaz is the wise elder, and his work, starting with Batang West Side (2002), gave permission to a generation to radically question the precepts of an overwhelmingly crass and commercial film culture whose past rebels, like Lino Brocka, are so rare that they’re treated like mythical heroes.

Now that Raya Martin, John Torres, and the rest have come into their own—forming the most dynamic and daring national cinema anywhere—it’s thrilling to see Diaz graze deeper into his own Malay ecosystem, where viewer adaptation to local conditions is absolutely essential, where certain categories can be tossed out with the trash. This creates some vexing, even hilarious, situations as festivals don’t quite know how to classify and exhibit the wild and roaming Lav. In Venice, The Orrizonti jury gave Encantos a special prize, but Venice programmers had slotted it in Orrizonti’s documentary category, even though Encantos is emphatically not a documentary. Toronto programmed it in a comfy, small screening room where viewers could stretch out, have a small table for food, and co-exist with the movie for most of an entire day. But Toronto’s catalogue note tried to titillate with some bizarre nonsense about “a graphic, extended lovemaking session,” while the well-intended idea to include the film in the festival’s new “Future Projections” section was a mistake. Sure, one could wander into the Spin Gallery to catch some scenes (then wander back several minutes later and think you were watching the same scene, even though you actually weren’t), but the film was plainly not served well.

The only real way to be with Diaz’s cinema is to sit in a pitch-dark room, watch, and let the outside world peel and drop away. Besides, a genuine epic is being told. In Durian’s wake, a poet named Benjamin Agustan (Roeder Camanag) returns to his home village, Padang, to see if any family members survived and if there’s anything left to salvage. Significantly, Benjamin is a leftist poet, a victim of torture by ruthless state security police, an exile who has spent several years in Russia. He returns to a place of apocalypse and ghosts, where the landscape has become downright lunar and the few trees left are awkward sticks in the ground, but also where, amazingly enough, a pair of old artist friends—sculptor Catalina (Angeli Bayani) and fellow poet Teodoro (Perry Dizon)—are trying to continue to live and work.

Benjamin has to adjust and dial down from the metropolitan, civilized but also odd and dislocating life he’s led in Russia (“Russians,” he tells Teodoro, “are a strange race—they’re Europeans, and not Europeans”) to this utterly denuded and tragic world, in which one’s sense of home has been ripped out and tossed away. Benjamin’s poetic instincts are both fueled and burdened by the memories of past lovers; an ex-lover looks very real as she’s nude, lying on her bed, but recurring images also seem to make her into a spectre, while a strange nighttime Zagreb setting is the basis for thoughts of another lost love. (Here, Diaz does something that Torres specializes in, salvaging footage from another film—in this case, an unfinished short about Filipino ghouls adrift in Eastern Europe—using it for other purposes and altering its context.) Benjamin’s memories grow especially intense concerning his family, including a mother who had long ago gone insane.

As he had developed over the course of making Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004) and Heremias (2006), Diaz establishes concrete reality and facts alongside a nearly mystical state of mind that at first occupies and eventually permeates the work. This shift precisely tracks the filmmaking process. Encantos did indeed begin as non-fiction; the former reporter Diaz dashed to Bicol (where he made his previous two films) two weeks after Durian hit to record the environmental and human conditions. Clearly, although he hasn’t said such, he discovered an extraordinary stage expressing a cosmic tragedy that called for some kind of narrative. The typhoon’s actual victims speak to Diaz’s camera, but the fictitious characters inside Encantos speak and walk inside a patiently conceived deep focus mise en scène, like somnambulistic beings out of I Walked with a Zombie (1943). They have enough time and space to ponder many things: the existence of a deity, the state of their country, the alchemy between nature and art (Catalina explains that she makes her sculptures from Mayon’s lava, as a way of taming it), how mortal beings become ghosts (Catalina to Benjamin: “You’re like a ghost—you go away, and then you reappear”).

There are many examples of how Diaz manages this interpolation of the concrete and ineffable, but one in particular stands out so impressively that it becomes a signature effect. His fixed DV camera, shooting in wide angle to better encompass a massive landscape, runs for minutes, sometimes even over ten, until something happens: a figure in the far distance appears. When does it appear? I’ve watched this phenomenon since Evolution, and despite intense concentration, I can never spot the exact moment when the character materializes on screen. It’s a cinema viewing experience without parallel, exactly recreating what happens if one were to stand in a large landscape and wait for a person to arrive from the extreme distance.

Several scenes have Benjamin suddenly emerging within such a space, reinforcing Catalina’s remark. By the seventh and eighth hours of Encantos, Benjamin is trapped between this reality and Bicol’s shadow world. Camanag stumbles around in a near-dead stupour, buffeted by the loss of his family, his failed attempts to make sense of his mother’s madness, and his inability to stoke some sort of love with Catalina, collapses in a heap as if the air’s been sucked out of him. Art has the last word: Catalina recites a vivid, stark chunk of Benjamin’s verse (written by Diaz, proving that he’s a poet of the first degree) that brings him back to life. Even a closing flashback of Benjamin being tortured doesn’t detract from the poem’s efficacy.

With such declarative expressions of art, Diaz is encouraging the viewer to free-associate with a basket teeming with cultural—mostly Western—associations. It’s impossible to consider his awed shots of the perfectly conical and gorgeously intimidating Mayon, in combination with Benjamin’s gradual dissolution, and not think of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Just as it is to gaze upon the impossibly rocky landscapes over stretches of extended time and not recall L’avventura (1960). Then there’s Rilke, whose apt quote, “Beauty is the beginning of terror,” opens Encantos. Images of Pudovkin and Tarkovsky tumble into the mind when Benjamin and Teodoro discuss Russia. And then there are the two great poles of theatre history, that are here elegantly folded into each other: Aeschylus’ voice of personal and national tragedy in the form of lament and pure grief, and Beckett’s existential comedy, the endless wait for the thing that will never transpire. But the wait, the wait…the bliss in that wait, the physical stamp—exhaustion, giddiness, discomfort—felt by watching that wait is the special, new thing that Lav Diaz has brought.

A LAV DIAZ TRIBUTE

Start:	Dec 28, '07 1:00p
End:	Dec 30, '07
Location:	Mogwai Cinematheque, Cubao X.

Mogwai Cinematheque presents:

A Lav Diaz Tribute

Mogwai Cinematheque will present Lav Diaz’s epic works

Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (December 28),

Heremias (Unang Aklat: Ang Alamat ng Prinsesang Bayawak) (December 29),

and

Death in the Land of Encantos (December 30).

All screenings start at 1 pm.

Mogwai is located at Cubao X.

Noel Vera's Review of 'DEATH IN THE LAND OF ENCANTOS'

http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/11/kagadanan-sa-banwaan-ning-mga-engkanto.html
 
Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos, Lav Diaz, 2007)

Land of the dead

Lav Diaz's Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos, 2007) might be the possible result if you took Spike Lee's 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke, recast it in Andrei Tarkovsky mode, stretched it to Bela Tarr length, added a dash of Abbas Kiarostami-like meta-cinema, sprinkled it with a few ideas from Mario O'Hara, and set it in the Bicol region. Possible, though I wonder if said bastard offspring will be anywhere near as strange as this.

It's ostensibly the story of one Benjamin Agusan ('Roeder' in the film's credits, full name 'Roeder Camanag'), a famed poet gone into some kind of self-imposed exile in Kaluga, a small town southwest of Moscow (Lav calls it an inside joke on behalf of his father, who was fascinated by Russia; the country's literature and sensibility has seeped into many of his previous films (particularly Serafin Geronimo: Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcion (Serafin Geronimo: Criminal of Barrio Concepcion, 1998), his version of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment)). He returns home to the vacation resort of Padang, near Legazpi City, in the wake of the devastation wreaked by Typhoon Reming (international name 'Durian')--a devastation made worse by typhoon-triggered lahar mudslides from nearby Mayon Volcano, burying homes and families alike (Padang was the worse-hit of the towns). He meets his friends Teodoro (Perry Dizon) and Catalina (Angeli Bayani), and is haunted by memories of former loves--Svita, a Russian beauty; Amalia (Sophia Aves), his longtime companion in Padang; his dead father, mother, sister.

It's an often seemingly shapeless, meandering tapestry, but Diaz is working on a vast canvas, five hundred and forty minutes long (his previous film Heremias Book One: The Legend of the Lizard Princess (2006) was about the same length; his Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family, 2004) eleven hours long). Front and center on that canvas is Benjamin, the latest incarnation of one of Diaz's favorite characters, the restless wanderer--early examples included kidnapper-fugitive Serafin Geronimo (Raymond Bagatsing) and cuckolded husband Lauro (Joel Torre) in Hubad sa Ilalim ng Buwan (Naked Under the Moon,1999). Murder victim Hanzel Harana (Yul Servo) was a younger version seeking a family to belong to in Batang West Side (West Side Avenue, 2001); turns out Detective Juan Mijares (Joel Torre), the police officer investigating Hanzel's death, was a similarly lost soul. Reynaldo was an inscrutable figure entering and walking away from the lives of various families in Ebolusyon; the eponymous character in Heremias traveled in his oxcart full of handicrafts--alone, restless, almost entirely speechless, yet somehow able to give the impression that he was searching for something.

Benjamin, thought, unlike Reynaldo or Heremias is a poet as well as a wanderer. With Encantos Diaz has discarded the taciturn probinsyano (hick provincial) protagonist for the more loquacious small-town artist, the creative intellectual who chooses to live outside of Manila while practicing their craft. Which is something of a relief--the Diaz character is prone to long periods of contemplation and in an eleven or nine hour film (such as Heremias, Ebolusyon, and this), where they have little else to say between the long bouts of silence, it can sometimes make for difficult viewing. This time we have three verbose philosophers, able and willing to indulge in the one sport in which Filipinos demonstrate a natural, world-class ability to excel: the freewheeling discourse. Hamin (short for Benjamin), Teodoro, and Catalina gaze at the blasted landscape and hold forth on various subjects--love, art, death, God, the social and political condition of the Philippines, the difference between Filipinos and Russians, mosquitoes (even science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick and horror filmmaker David Cronenberg merit a quick mention). Diaz supplies all the dialogue, presumably; from personal experience I know him to be a world-class raconteur, able to talk to the wee hours of the morning on any subject imaginable. His extemporaneous monologue on pre-colonial Filipino sex in John Torres' Todo Todo Teros (2006) was a both illuminating and hilarious highlight of that film; here the skill provides enough meat to sustain the soul during our long journey through the film's narrative.

It helps that the film is full of poetry. Possibly taking a page from Mario O'Hara's masterpiece Pangarap ng Puso (Demons, 2000), where poetry and monsters haunted the imaginations of the protagonists, Diaz inserts verses here, there, and they function as lyrical commentary on and response to the film's themes and storyline (he had put poetry to memorable use once before, when Joel Lamangan gave an evocative reading of one of his pieces in Hesus Rebolusyunaryo (Jesus the Revolutionary, 2002)). Diaz at one point even has a kapre (a Filipino ogre) stalking his forest--you could almost imagine the creature wandering off from O'Hara's set and finding its way to Padang.

Sometimes the meandering nature of the discussions make for surprising turns, create startling connections. The three friends sitting in front of a lamp in utter darkness (it's night, and there's a brownout) talk about mosquitoes, how sliced raw onions sometimes drive them off, sometimes don't. Talk moves on to patterns in insect behavior, and Hamin tells of how writers and filmmakers seize on these patterns to tell postmodern stories of bizarre human activity (hence the mention of Dick, Cronenberg, and for good measure poet Ted Hughes). Catalina speaks out against such unfeeling fiction; she prefers to dwell in emotion and mystery. Talk shifts to the mysteries of the rosary, and how the Philippines seem to be mired in what rosary holders call a Sorrowful Mystery--the Death and Crucifixion stage, to be exact. Catalina's reply to this is a vow to tell the truth the best she can, through her art; Hamin asks (rather sardonically): is she willing to die for her art? Catalina sits and stares, not answering; the talk, having moved from evening dark to practical considerations to literary and cinematic themes, rose into a broad philosophical debate that peaked with a declaration of redemptive action, then with the mention of the ultimate darkness plunged back into the surrounding gloom (which, of course, is but a reminder of the larger gloom)--this being the shape of the film's past ten or so minutes.

Catalina often acts as foil, if not actual opponent, to Hamin's fatalism, her maternal and sexual life force countering his sense of despair. Against his insect behavior she responds with emotion and mystery; against his neglect of Amalia (who loyally cleaned and maintained his studio while he was in Russia, even insisted on speaking of him in glowing terms) she mischievously suggests that she'll mount an exhibit in tribute to the woman, displaying sculptures of Amalia's body parts, even private parts. There's sarcasm in Catalina's suggestion, but also something affirming: Amalia is gone, and this is a way of remembering her, keeping some portion of her vital, alive.

Against Mayon Catalina is all practical defiance; she acknowledges the volcano's beauty (it's considered the most perfect cone in the world), the same time she condemns the mountain for killing thousands of people over the years--is perhaps poised to kill thousands more (as Hamin notes, only one-fourth of the volcanic mud has been expended; the other three-fourths sits there, waiting for the next powerful typhoon). Knowledge of all that sludge waiting to bury her doesn't faze Catalina one bit; she just goes on working, taking mud from the volcano's slopes and using it for her sculptures, transforming it, taking material for potential death and giving it new life.

But the film's title speaks of death, not life; despite all of Catalina's (and Teodoro's, and Hamin's) artistic and creative powers, they can't stop Mount Mayon, or Typhoon Reming, or the Philippine government's more oppressive policies towards leftists (at one point it's mentioned that over 800 unarmed political activists have been killed since President Macapagal-Arroyo took power, a good portion of them Bicolanos). On a trip to Manila to find out what had happened to his mother (he knew she had died in a mental hospital, but didn't know the exact circumstances), Hamin again meets one of the paramilitary officers that had interrogated him, irrevocably changing his life (or so it seems).

As director Diaz shows more confidence in the black-and-white digital medium than he's ever shown before. He managed with a limited variety of lighting in Ebolusyon; in Heremias" he learned to create more expressive lighting schemes, sometimes even in inclement weather (weather he often created himself, using a water truck and fire hose). In this film he has sunlight waxing and waning as Catalina and Hamin talk in her outdoor studio (the light rhyming with the waning and waxing of the discussion); he has the three friends stage an entire debate (the aforementioned insect behavior patterns vs. emotion and mystery controversy) in the light of a single lamp; in Manila he has the camera sit low, like a political prisoner squatting on the floor, while it watches Hamin and his former torturer (their silhouettes vivid against the harsh Manila sunlight) talk about their past, present, future.

The last scene demonstrates an interesting series of directorial choices--why doesn't Diaz give us a clear look at Hamin's tormentor? Why does he allow the officer to play the role so melodramatically, like a low-budget action-movie villain? Was the conversation the event that triggered Hamin's suicidal downward spiral, or was it yet another symptom--a decisive one--of said spiral? Did Hamin imagine the whole encounter, this being his way of putting the blame on a concrete figure, his way of evading feelings of anger and grief and guilt at the apparent neglectful death of his mother?

The mother's departure from their home is a defining event in Hamin's life, and Diaz treats it as such with his camerawork. In a single shot the camera follows Hamin from behind as he walks up to a girl and boy playing among the trees, and we recognize the young Hamin playing with his sister Teresa; the man walks to the right, the camera following, till he's facing his childhood home. Suddenly a doctor in white coat emerges from the left of the house, pulling his mother along, walking past him. Hamin walks to the left, the camera panning to follow, just in time to catch both doctor and mother disappearing into the forest, then turns to look back at the home his mother left behind. This is Diaz's second foray into Jose Rizal territory, into the iconographic imagery of Rizal's famed novel Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not), his way in particular of evoking the figure of Sisa, the mother turned madwoman by the disappearance of her children and the tyranny of an unjust government. Diaz made this journey once before, with the story of Reynaldo's mother in Ebolusyon; fellow Filipino filmmakers Mario O'Hara, Lino Brocka, and Gerardo de Leon made the journey before him with their respective films (O'Hara's great Sisa (1998); Brocka's influential Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Judged But Found Wanting, 1974); De Leon's seminal Sisa and definitive Noli Me Tangere (1951 and 1961, respectively)). But where O'Hara, Brocka and de Leon's various Sisas were all helpless hysterics, singing folk songs when they weren't moaning after their missing children, Diaz's is the quieter kind, somehow kin to his gallery of wandering loners (you could say mother infected son with her temperament). She goes on to wander in and out of her son's consciousness, leading him to his inevitable fate.

Beyond all this, though--beyond the melodrama and dialogue--is Diaz's apparent relationship with the Bicolano landscape. In Ebolusyon and Heremias he seemed to disagree with the landscape, struggle against it, carefully angle his camera to capture the bleakest, least flattering aspect of an undeniably lush vista. Returning to the same region with Encantos (you might say the film is a sequel to the first two) the struggle has been resolved; Diaz's camera gazes at the treeless, houseless, blasted landscape with confidence, a sense of propriety, almost a sense of fulfillment. It's as if Diaz has discovered that the desolation left in the wake of Reming (with Mayon collaborating) is the perfect visual metaphor for the political and spiritual wasteland he feels was left in the wake of Philippine society (with the administration governing) in its downward spiral. This, Diaz seems to be saying to us, is the Philippines, nor are we out of it. One of the best--and most important--films to come out this year.


(First published in Businessworld, 11/27/07)

(Winner of a Golden Lion Special Mention at the Orizzonti (Horizons) Documentary Section of this year's Venice Film Festival)

"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