Actualités

Lav Diaz's Season of the Devil, which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from July 30 – August 28, 2019 in Mubi's Luminaries series.A supremely powerful 4-hour lament for human suffering, Lav Diaz's Season of the Devil was clearly the token “hardcore” art-house movie in the competition section of the Berlin International Film Festival, where it premiered. But the Filipino director's reputation for difficulty—very long movies, long scenes done in long takes—is a misnomer: the challenge of Lav’s films aren’t their length, which can be relaxed into, or their languor, which allows for both inattention and contemplation. The challenge they raise are for a Philippine history unrecorded and perhaps even unwritten in the official records. It is a challenge to the once-seen but now-unsaid—and a challenge to those in power. Season of the Devil states: “This happened, look at it, experience it...

“These are my friends. And this is a tribute and a memoriam to them.”

The cinema of Filipino director Lav Diaz has always been about time, its essence as well as its way to define people and their surroundings. Considering the average length of one of his films varying between four to ten hours, Diaz has repeatedly abandoned what is commonly known as mainstream cinema and popular conceptions of what cinema is. For authors such as Sascha Westphal, for example, Diaz is a director in the same tradition as Andrei Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr, but then again, even the attempt of categorizing films like “Norte – The End of History” (2013) or “The Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery” (2016) with the label “slow cinema” does not really fit with the kind of work Diaz has delivered throughout his career.

“Season of the Devil ” is screening at the 27th Art Film Fest Kosice

In a nutshell,...

“These are my friends. And this is a tribute and a memoriam to them.”

The cinema of Filipino director Lav Diaz has always been about time, its essence as well as its way to define people and their surroundings. Considering the average length of one of his films varying between four to ten hours, Diaz has repeatedly abandoned what is commonly known as mainstream cinema and popular conceptions of what cinema is. For authors such as Sascha Westphal, for example, Diaz is a director in the same tradition as Andrei Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr, but then again, even the attempt of categorizing films like “Norte – The End of History” (2013) or “The Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery” (2016) with the label “slow cinema” does not really fit with the kind of work Diaz has delivered throughout his career.

In a nutshell, “slow cinema” is most likely associated with a film’s running time,...

“These are my friends. And this is a tribute and a memoriam to them.”

The cinema of Filipino director Lav Diaz has always been about time, its essence as well as its way to define people and their surroundings. Considering the average length of one of his films varying between four to ten hours, Diaz has repeatedly abandoned what is commonly known as mainstream cinema and popular conceptions of what cinema is. For authors such as Sascha Westphal, for example, Diaz is a director in the same tradition as Andrei Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr, but then again, even the attempt of categorizing films like “Norte – The End of History” (2013) or “The Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery” (2016) with the label “slow cinema” does not really fit with the kind of work Diaz has delivered throughout his career.

In a nutshell, “slow cinema” is most likely associated with a film’s running time,...

Season of the DevilCan a completely grueling experience be worth the effort, the investment of time and self? In the case of An Elephant Sitting Still, the first film by the young Chinese novelist Hu Bo, we’re talking about a four-hour story of such constant despair that not a single moment of joy or literal ray of sunlight pierces its desperate drama. But it is most definitely worth the ordeal. This bleak opus is not only the first but also the last film by Hu Bo, who killed himself at the age of 29 after its completion. This desire of some for release from life's onslaught of sorrow, ill-luck, bad decisions and a lack of compassion or even superficial pleasure can be felt in every single brutal minute of this sprawling film.Initially, the despair is repulsive, not a glimpse but a full on plunge into the void. A gangster...

Following up his Golden Lion-winning drama The Woman Who Left, Lav Diaz is returning to Berlinale 2018 with his latest film, Ang Panahon ng Halimaw aka Season of the Devil. Described as an “anti-musical musical, a rock opera, that delves into mythology,” the first trailer has now arrived ahead of the premiere in competition later this month.

According to The National, the film features 33 songs composed by the Filipino director himself and the story, which takes place during former president Ferdinand Marcos’s military dictatorship, follows “a man whose wife has been abducted in their remote village.”

Starring Piolo Pascual, Shaina Magdayao, Pinky Amador, Bituin Escalante, Hazel Orencio, Joel Saracho, Bart Guingona, Angel Aquino, Lilit Reyes, and Don Melvin Boongaling, see the trailer below via CineMaldito.

Season of the Devil will premiere at Berlinale 2018.

Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince and Pernille Fischer Christensen’s Unga Astrid picked for Berlinale Special.

Source: Wiki Commons

Steven Soderbergh, José Padilha

Five more films have joined the main lieups of the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 15 - 25). A further six films have been selected for the programme of the Berlinale Special.

Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane will get an out of competition world premiere. It stars Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah and Juno Temple and was reportedly shot on iPhone.

Also premiering out of competition is José Padilha’s true story thriller 7 Days In Entebbe, starring Rosamund Pike, Daniel Brühl and Eddie Marsan.

New films from Lav Diaz and Alonso Ruizpalacios will play in competition.

Rupert Everett’s Oscar Wilde biopic The Happy Prince and Becoming Astrid by Pernille Fischer Christensen have been added to the Berlinale Special Gala section.

Read more: Robert Pattinson, Christian Petzold movies join Berlin Film Festival Competition

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