Lav Diaz Director
Filmography Selected
Lavrente Indico Diaz aka Lav Diaz is a filmmaker from the Philippines who was born on December 30, 1958 and raised in Cotabato, Mindanao. He works as director, writer, producer, editor, cinematographer, poet, composer, production designer and actor all at once.
His films are about the social and political struggles of his motherland and through these, he has garnered the admiration of the international festival circuit.
Since 1998 he has directed twelve films, and won several international awards. His 2002 film Batang West Side won Best Picture at the Singapore International Film Festival, plus awards at the Independent Film Festival of Brussels, Gawad Urian, and Cinemanila International Film Festival. He also received a Gawad Urian for his 2005 film Evolution of a Filipino Family and Special Jury Prize at the Fribourg International Film Festival in 2006 for Heremias, Book One. His film Death in the Land of Encantos, was the closing film of the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival 2007, and was awarded a Golden Lion Special Mention. His 2008 eight-hour film Melancholia, a story about victims of summary executions, won the Orizzonti Grand Prize at the 65th Venice International Film Festival in 2008, and Florentina Hubaldo, CTE has received Best Film at Images Festival, Toronto and Jeonju International Film Festival in 2012. In 2010 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2011 joined the Board of Directors for Cine Foundation International. The Venice Film Festival calls him “the ideological father of the New Philippine Cinema”.
In 2013, his latest film Norte, The End of History, was presented at the Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard) in 2013.
1998 Criminal of Barrio Concepcion (Serafin Geronimo: Kriminal ng Barrio Concepcion)
132 min / color
1999 Burger Boys
103 min / color
1999 Naked Under The Moon (Hubad sa Ilalim ng Buwan)
110 min / color
2002 West Side Kid (Batang West Side)
315 min / b&w and color
2002 Jesus, Revolutionary (Hesus Rebolusyunaryo)
112min / color
2004 Evolution of a Filipino Family (Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino)
343 min / b&w
2006 Heremias, Book One: The Legend of the Lizard Princess (Heremias, Unang Aklat:
Ang Alamat ng Prinsesang Bayawak)
540 min / color
2007 Death in the Land of Encantos (Kagadanan Sa Banwaan Ning Mga Engkanto)
330 min / b&w
2008 Melancholia
480 min / b&w
2011 Woman of The Wind (Babae ng Hangin)
120 min / b&w
2011 Century of Birthing
360 min / b&w
2012 Florentina Hubaldo, CTE
360 min / b&w
2013 Norte, The End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan)
250 min / color
★★★★★
"Innocence and punishment come together in this gripping Dostoyevskian epic from the Filipino director Lav Diaz: a gigantic four-hour saga composed with pellucid clarity and simplicity, and a kind of transcendental naturalism. This is a classical tragedy of the modern Philippines and of global capitalism, a story of violence, hate, fear and love spread out on a colossal panorama which extends its reach into the realms of the spiritual and the supernatural…What incredible ambition: it is visionary film-making."
Peter Bradshaw The Guardian
See also a video review by Peter Bradshaw here
★★★★★
"Bristling with plot and ideas..spellbinding"
Tim Robey The Daily Telegraph
★★★★★
"Filipino tour de force is the summer movie equivalent of the world cup final"
Time Out
★★★★★
"Easily one of the highlights of this year's world cinema slate"
Daniel Green CineVue
★★★★★
"A must-see...superb"
Jamie Graham Total Film
★★★★
"Every sequence is a masterclass in visual and aural composition"
Philip Concannon The Skinny
★★★★★
"Novelistic is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days, but Diaz’s film more than earns the adjective, and you’d have to go back to Edward Yang’s Yi Yi to find another movie that approaches a marathon-length running time yet still makes you wish it were twice as long."
David Fear Time Out New York
‘A mesmerising experience that grows deeper and broader the longer it goes on.'
Kieron Corless, Sight and Sound
'More than four hours long, filmed in expansive takes with almost no close-ups and very few camera movements, Lav Diaz’s Norte, the End of History is a tour de force of slow cinema... There is also an almost inexhaustible humanism at the heart of this remarkable film. It is the work of a director as fascinated by decency as by ugliness, and able to present the chaos of life in a series of pictures that are at once luminously clear and endlessly mysterious'.
A.O. Scott, The New York Times
‘NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY … Lav Diaz’s Dostoyevskian mini-epic—at four hours, a mere sip for this hitherto-oceanic filmmaker—may prove the greatest work of the Philippine New Wave.'
James Quandt, Best Films of 2013, Artforum
'Film of the Week...What partly makes Norte so compelling is Diaz’s extraordinary mise en scène, and the way that he and DP Manda use the widescreen frame...Any thought of Diaz as a director who makes it all up as he goes along is comprehensively belied by a tightly structured narrative that, for all its length and languid pacing, contains very little dead time'...The film is a marvel of simplicity, depth, and deviousness too.
Jonathan Romney,
Film Comment
Diaz 'matches his tremendous artistry with both quiet spiritualism and a rare wisdom of the ways of the world.'
David Hudson, Fandor
'To attempt to seriously braid the political, the psychological, and the spiritual in a single narrative system! Who besides Ford, Mizoguchi, Dreyer, and Rossellini have successfully tried? (And not even their best attempts were flawless.) Norte is a work that deserves consideration in the same terms and contexts as the work of these masters.
...Living in both the Philippines and New York City, Diaz is the first great filmmaker to be equally and decisively marked by the West and the East. The West gives him a taste for psychologism and very elaborate narrative construction. The East gives him the taste and talent for impassive allegorical mural-images that compress historical-political themes into single comprehensive images. The combination is not like anything you’ve ever seen before.'
Larry Gross, Film Comment
Diaz 'has done something extraordinary and cinematic—or put another way, something extraordinarily cinematic—at every level: narrative, formal, visual, performative, and philosophical.'
Rowena Santos Aquino,
Next Projection‘The best film I saw at Cannes’
Kieron Corless, Sight and Sound
'While Diaz is renowned as an exponent of 'slow cinema,' the plot actually moves at a rather brisk pace, as the filmmaker follows both characters in their respective descents into the abyss, and in terms of its narrative scope and thematic grandeur, Norte comes close to truly attaining a novelistic quality, worthy of the authors to whom Diaz looks for inspiration.'Daniel Fairfax,
Senses of Cinema
'An unsparing portrait of youthful reactions to economic and ideological distress in the Philippines, this three-person tapestry told across expanses of years and geography remains intimate in its deference to its individual characters, their faces and body movements, the tone of their conversation, within and across these large spaces, unfurling in incident and observation through the unfurling time.'
Daniel Kasman, MUBI
'...the lights went down, the movie came up, and I sat there. Two-hundred-fifty minutes later, the lights came up, I stood with tears in my eyes, and clapped as loudly as I ever have for any movie in my life...'
Wesley Morris, Grantland
'Norte tells a big story on a grand scale, but its emphasis, moment by moment, is on the quotidian. It's simplicity that resonates most deeply of all.'
Calum Marsh, The Village Voice
‘Norte is formidable cinema that doesn't shy away from exploring history, philosophy, politics and religion at length. But it's also a story of three individuals, through whom these topics gain sharper focus.’Thomas Hachard,
National Public Radio (USA)