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There is something compulsive and driven about Lav Diaz's cinema. The filmmaker, who has won multiple awards, including the Golden Lion (“ The Woman Who Left ”), repeatedly immerses himself in stories of violence in the Philippines and returns to the same gloomy diagnoses. He digs into wounds that won't heal. Old ghosts just don't want to rest. As is well known, Diaz takes a lot of time to listen to you. His longest film “Evolution Of A Filipino Family” lasts almost eleven hours, and his new work “A Tale Of Filipino Violence” is also a real challenge at six hours and 49 minutes in terms of its enormous length.

With “Servando Magdamag” the director has written and directed a television series for the first time, based on the short story of the same name by Ricardo Lee. From the filmed material of the announced eight-part series, this film called “A Tale Of Filipino Violence” was created, which will be released before the start of the TV series. So, Lav Diaz offers the opportunity to experience his story in two very different ways.

The film is subtitled “Sine Novela”. A film novel. And what a Lav Diaz brought a luscious ham to the screen (once again). As I said, you need almost seven hours for this mix of historical epic, melodrama, and artistic parable. In atmospherically dense pictorial compositions and with a variety of storylines, he follows the abysses of a wealthy Filipino family that breaks into its individual parts.

The head of the family is dying. Servando Tres (Bart Guingona) committed numerous offenses in building his legacy, and yet he always got away with it. However, with the death of the patriarch imminent, the family is now at a crossroads. Servando Monzon VI ( John Lloyd Cruz) is to take over the clan's business and the hacienda. But he struggles with the family legacy and the political system with which he is supposed to cooperate. The cruel past of his clan will not rest.

Lav Diaz once again looks at the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s. Its social panorama stretches from landlords, murderers, preachers, outcasts, workers, and brutal military men. In grotesque images, armed soldiers appear as foreign bodies in the landscape to hunt down communists and rebels. It's a significant turning point in the film. An escape from this ideological world, for example into religion, Diaz shows only as a parallel sphere of fatal power structures. Right at the beginning, a man who grew up in a sect takes cruel revenge on his father. The titular violence takes different forms here.

As usual, the overwhelming duration is of central importance. Even though a lot happens, and many characters have to be given substance, the time hardly wants to run out in more than 400 minutes. Like many of the director's works, you have to get through them. And yet, it is precisely in this that they unfold their power: in empathizing with and suffering through a frozen transitional phase that binds the characters like chains. It is time itself that also tells the story in this Lav Diaz drama.

What he succeeds in particularly impressively is his complex history. That means: understanding the present and the past in an exchange, thinking time in different directions. “A Tale Of Filipino Violence” doesn't simply encapsulate its bygone era as a cautionary tale. His diagnosis of the state of Philippine society allows yesterday to speak into the present and future, and vice versa. She conducts research into causes and looks for connecting lines.

In the figure of the dying patriarch, earlier crimes disappear, which the protagonist Servando is now trying to come to terms with. His worn-out subconscious also reaches for the form of this film. Documents from the 16th century that Servando reeds bear witness to violent, ongoing colonialism. “A never-ending nightmare“, Servando whispers. Again and again, the ghostly image of a burning house shimmers, accompanied by a whimper. And a symbol of Servando himself, floating around on a raft in a thunderstorm and yet never reaching the shore.

In between, figures in the picturesque black-and-white tableaux sing plaintively – Diaz once again builds a bridge to his musical experiment "In Times of the Devil”. Such digressions pause and shenanigans constantly bring “A Tale Of Filipino Violence” to a standstill, but enrich its complex picture of a mood of doom immensely.

When it comes to the final punch line, nothing can be saved in the family cosmos. He is rotten from the inside and sees himself and his property as a small cog in a large machine. He helps shape the external circumstances and at the same time succumbs powerlessly to their structures. In this interweaving, Diaz shows his very own vision of a soap opera. For example, when he reveals in the table talk how the parallel story of a murderer (also played by John Lloyd Cruz) fits together with the rest of the story. All kinds of abstruse entanglements and secrets have to be discussed. Such moments shine best with dry humor to make one's own sadness more bearable.

Lav Diaz uses familiar formulas

The only question is whether Lav Diaz's ​​films are slowly exhausting themselves in their constant loops. They continue to fascinate with their unmistakable, idiosyncratic language of form, but their hopeless, leaden heaviness now reveals a certain routine. Maybe their future actually lies more in gathering and condensing, as the director did so brilliantly in “When The Waves Are Gone ”, which also premiered in 2022 and is “only” half as long?

On the other hand, Lav Diaz's filmography thrives on such repetitions, cycles, echoes, and open ends that continue elsewhere in a similar form and seek redemption. A devastating storm is approaching here. It's just waiting to unleash itself over the desolate world the filmmaker portrays. Diaz has repeatedly used such natural phenomena as mirror images. One of many points at which his stories enter into a dialogue and both despair and hope. “I keep longing” are then also the appropriate last words sung in this film. I keep longing.

Conclusion: With this seven-hour film, Lav Diaz once again manages a thrilling balancing act between an enlightening history lesson and a sensually demanding cinema experience. “A Tale Of Filipino Violence” unmasks the dark side of an entire country through a family legacy.