I
Alexis Tioseco Indictment And Empowerment Of The Individual: The Modern Cinema Of Lav Diaz – p. 5
II
Alexis Tioseco In Conversation With Lav Diaz – p. 11
III
Lav Diaz The Aesthetic Challenge Of ‘Batang West Side’ – p. 37
IV
Lav Diaz Our Death, In Memoriam – p. 41
V
Lav Diaz Poems For Benjamin Agusan – p. 45
VI
Dodo Dayao & Mabie Alagbate Beer And Brocka – p. 61
VII
Michael Guarneri Everyday Struggle, Struggle Every Day: Lav Diaz Rebolusyonaryo – p. 71
VIII Nadin Mai In Conversation With Lav Diaz – p. 83
Retrospective Programme – p. 96
Over and above describing himself as a filmmaker, Lav Diaz prefers the definition of “cultural worker”. Driven by a sense of political engagement, he has denounced the series of miseries suffered by the Philippines since the time of Spanish colonialism (followed by occupations by both the Japanese and the Americans, as well as a period of martial law), focusing particularly on the years of the Marcos dictatorship. It is a feeling of love for his compatriots and their suffering that pushed him to depict, with a beauty and sense of urgency rarely found in cinema, the daily grind of life in small towns and in the countryside. Yet the lengthy, majestic black-and-white frescoes, lasting anywhere between 4 and 11 hours, which brought him to notice on the festival circuit, surely cannot be restricted to kinship with the Slow Cinema movement. Characterised by a radical formalism, his cinematic approach is to recount the life and rhythm of his community by means of the suffering and slowness that define it. It is for these reasons that Lav Diaz can be seen as a major artist for our times: his cinema is that of a pedagogue—something shared here with that of his intellectual, idealistic father and, still more, with Lino Brocka whose wish it was “to educate his people”—as well as bearing essential witness. The extraordinary duration of his films, their lengthy shots displaying a superb harmony, their realism (“life in real time”), all combine to demolish the system in order to liberate ourselves from the constraints of the present day. It is with enormous pride that CINEMATEK, BOZAR and Courtisane come together to present the first Lav Diaz retrospective in Belgium—and, to date, the largest in Europe—and to welcome the director from 10–12 November for a symposium in Antwerp and two evenings in Brussels. Nicola Mazzanti CINEMATEK, Director Paul Dujardin BOZAR, CEO, Artistic Director Pieter-Paul Mortier Courtisane, Director
1