Synopsis
A Filipino poet returns home after the typhoon.
Death in the Land of Encantos
2007 ‘Kagadanan sa Banwaan Ning mga Engkanto’ Directed by Lav Diaz
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This film is terrifying. Diaz has other works which are more graphic (I don't think I could handle a rewatch of Florentina Hubaldo anytime soon), but this one in particular really gets under my skin. Death in the Land of Encantos, as you could probably guess, is a meditation on death. Loss. The loss of multiple villages in Bicol. The death of hundreds upon hundreds of people. Families broken from the central typhoon Reming which, if it didn't kill them, left them jobless and homeless. It's a film about the slow, painful death of the Filipino artistic spirit, encapsulated in the character Benjamin (aka Hamin). Over the course of these 9 hours, we spiral with Hamin into the bottomless, horrifying…
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It's another really strong film from Lav Diaz.
It is study of the melancholy of the artist in a society where the worth of his ambition is recognised by only a few other artists, the melancholy bestowed by the radiance of an impossible object.
Diaz shows more confidence in the black-and-white digital medium than he's ever shown before. The images are strong. Every single frame has its particular strength. But on top of the visuals, the dialogues are heavy. Very philosophical. Very thought-provoking.
I don't think there's another filmmaker out there like him and this film shows his very singular control over his craft - something that is hard to sustain for 9 hours, and yet Diaz does it with such ease.
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No surprise that this is another masterpiece by Lav Diaz. I think hes becoming my favorite of all time? One thing I love about Diaz and this film is how information is fed to the audience. We will watch something for a long time and have no idea why that shot is significant but he keeps you guessing and making assumptions until the information is filled in. It's such a cool thing that he does quiet often, it's nothing new but it works really well with his style. Out of all 9 hours of this film I feel that no time was wasted. This wasn't an easy watch for me, I took way more breaks than usual but the outcome is always well worth it. Everyone in this delivers wonderful performances as always, I love this group of actors that were in a lot of Diaz's films at the time.
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The enormity of a country's collective grief and guilt. Wasted landscapes populated by the walking dead, quietly haunted by those buried under their feet. Past events and relationships resurfacing in the aftermath. A reality so cruel that only through film could it begin to be digestible. Healing comes slow but the visible scars remain.
A thin veneer separates scripted drama and docufiction in Death in the Land of Encantos. Typical genre terms fail to adequately describe the newfound space that Lav Diaz carves out. A poet's words aren't enough. A sculptor's creations can't truly give it shape. Even Diaz himself with this behemoth of a film could only contain so much, and yet still fall short.
Here, intellectuals and commoners…
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There is a depth to the suffering in Encantos rarely encountered outside of Diaz's other monumental temporal works (Florentina Hubaldo, CTE and Melancholia may be the only two films more painful), this being a film which utilizes the depth of the static landscape to its advantage just as the malleability of the handheld landscape shifts and mutates into an emotional mass. The aftermath of an event is far more important than the event itself, as memories are the only things left behind.
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88/100
"Your life is just poetry. Meanwhile everything around you is being destroyed."
While his last film Heremias was one of his more conventionally-structured pieces, Death In The Land Of The Encantos proves to be radically different by taking the form of a docufiction, suffused with verses of poetry and intellectual dialect, alternating between deeply-psychological and cynically objective modes of filmic narrative. If there's one thing to be gleaned from his films, it is that very few filmmakers love their country as passionately as Lav Diaz feels for Phillipines and its people. The way he highlights the ugliness and shame buried within Filipino history―with the same amount of attention that he pays to his nation's scenic beauty and the richness…
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90/100
Captures loss, grief, trauma, guilt in a way only Lav Diaz can. This has my favourite opening to his film since "Evolution of a Filipino Family". There's his usual biting critique of the government, especially the suppression of creative freedom but he also here questions the artistic obsession and selfishness. Visually it's one of Diaz's finest works, there are some stunning images. The docu-fiction style works superbly and the way he incorporated the real life interviews was fantastic, it totally blurs the line between real and fiction. Expectedly there are multiple sequences of pure brilliance and nothing feels unnecessary. This is a humongous piece of work(his second longest) while it wasn't as emotionally powerful as "Melancholia" & "Florentina Hubaldo, CTE" , it still hits incredibly hard. Diaz really don't miss.
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A slow descent into hell; actually, not a descent, rather the land has already been razed to the ground. Hell is here from the beginning. The closest thing Diaz has come to pure horror. The experience the viewer has here is unique; due to its loose formalism, drifting off and waking up to the exact same scene; nothing happens, nothing will happen.
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A balikbayan horror story centering on a poet’s homecoming journey into a typhoon-ravaged wasteland—and then eventually into madness. This is yet another immensely bleak but intellectually engaging experiment by Lav Diaz. The film functions both as a scathing critique on culture and politics but also as a paean to the artistic and survivor spirit of Filipinos. This is a cinematic sturm und drang that left me breathless. Those nine hours flew by so fast.
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In late November, 2006 the intensely devastating super typhoon Durian hit Philippines and wrecked havoc in the coastal regions killing countless people and triggering the mudflow from the Mayon volcano causing further casualties that spread shock waves throughout the country. Death in The land of Encantos is a cinematic titan where the cataclysm of a typhoon runs into the harrowing ruination of a poet's mind and the colossal nihilism emanating from the collision gradually soaks into the viewer's flesh and bone. Losing optimism during the time of crisis is dangerous but being hopeful about art's potential to bring a change for the good is emblematic to an even bigger problem when you are being governed by an oppressive regime, Diaz's…
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If there was one film that I felt truly represented my country, this would be it. I wished I could have seen it in one 9 hour sitting, but alas, human needs, and life, intervened. The pain and sorrow I feel when I just stop and think about being a Filipino is captured in this film; we often sit around, recognize, and talk about these problems, but rarely do anything about them, because sometimes we realize we can't.