Thus is the conflict of slow cinema at its most fully embraced. The criticisms are rooted in making the film more compact, more accessible, and easier. There may be people who go to Evolution of a Filipino Family, looking at the film like it's an item off a checklist, or a bragging right. Not to say it can be neither of these things; it can actually be both if you're a cool kid who brags about having watched a Lav Diaz movie. But you shouldn't be going into this movie and acting all surprised when it won't meet you in the middle. It doesn't care if you're bored. It doesn't care if you're confused. It stays the same for those…

98/100

Filmed over a span of 10 years, running over a period of 10 hours, illuminating the unseen face of a nation spread across its past, present and projected future, this is Evolution of a Filipino Family. This is Lav Diaz. This is cinema at its most potent, mined to its extremes and exploited like never before, fixing a hard gaze on the neglected and abused―the lowest strata of civilized society―like nothing has ever dared to.

Even if the film starts off by following a farming clan trudging along the fields under a glaring sun, it is soon made clear that the 'Filipino family' in the title refers also to the history of the larger nationwide family, made up of…

Wow...

Just, wow.

I've finally returned to Diaz after a several month break and this only further solidified him as my favorite director.

We follow various branches of a family and their Sisyphean struggle to survive in poverty. There's love, loss, bridges are formed, bridges are burned, they chop wood, they farm, and for as little "action" as there is, a LOT happens. Diaz represents Filipino life perfectly. The characters he paints feel pulled straight from real life. Which makes sense because they kind of are.

"I have a very clear picture of that period and the characters' struggles. I grew up during that period and I know these characters; I have tried to understand that period and will continue…

Welcome back to stockholm syndrome with Lav Diaz, tonights hot topic, a ten hour evocation of Filipino underclass conflicts and an ever decreasing sense of individuality. Think 100 Years of Solitude with less Aureliano's and far fewer words. Ostensibly the longest film I've ever tackled, at around 10 hours this daunting deity of somnolent terror is nothing to take lightly, though the hours will breeze by faster than one first imagines when looking at the time remaining with wide bloodshot eyes. This review is dedicated to the poor folks who tried to watch this at Toronto upon its release - "Was unconscionably scheduled with just one 10-minute intermission". The first four or five hours nurture the aura of cosiness, the…

Thus is the conflict of slow cinema at its most fully embraced. The criticisms are rooted in making the film more compact, more accessible, and easier. There may be people who go to Evolution of a Filipino Family, looking at the film like it's an item off a checklist, or a bragging right. Not to say it can be neither of these things; it can actually be both if you're a cool kid who brags about having watched a Lav Diaz movie. But you shouldn't be going into this movie and acting all surprised when it won't meet you in the middle. It doesn't care if you're bored. It doesn't care if you're confused. It stays the same for those…

Every once in a while, you come across a movie that changes you, a movie that you cannot stop thinking about, a movie that you cannot wait to get back into, a movie that will render you speechless, quite literally so since I couldn't quite articulate exactly how I felt about this movie after my first watch.

I was angry at myself for being restless on my first watch, for not paying the attention the movie demanded from me. Which is probably why I went through pages and pages of trying to write how I felt but finally gave up on writing it, and I knew I couldn't do it without revisiting the movie as soon as possible. And I…

At what point does a film's excessive runtime stop being a prerequisite to tell its story on an epic canvas, and start being a gimmick? I guess there is no fixed answer for this. After all, there are films that are longer, much longer even, than this film, and which I love (La Flor, Out 1, to name only two) - but Evolution of a Filipino Family is well past that point for me. It frustrated me in a way that usually only Béla Tarr films manage do.

While I appreciate the effort, and while I liked some things that I saw, I can't help but think that there is no way this film really requires 10 hours to do…

20 Movies ‚ 20 Countries
#5 Philippines
⁦▪️⁩Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004)

فيلم فيليبيني إنتاج عام 2004 من إخراج العبقري المتفرد لاڤ دياز قصه الفيلم عن عائلة فلبينية مكونة من جدة والتي تعتني بثلاث فتيات مراهقات والمشاكل التي تواجههم في حياتهم

الفيلم صادق جداً في طريقة عرضه للدولة الفلبينية من وجهة نظر عائلة فلبينية فقيرة الفيلم تم تصويرة علي مدار 10 سنوات تخيل مدي إتقان وإخلاص دياز للفيلم دياز اتكلم عن صناع سينما فلبينيين أخرين مهدر حقهم الفيلم ايضا بيعكس فترة الحكم الظالم في الفليبين وتصوير لمختلف الفضائح التي ارتكبها الرئيس ماركوس اثناء الحكم العسكري مشاهد الثورة في الفيلم كانت حقيقة من الأرشيف اثناء هذه الفترة الربط ومزج المشاهد الحقيقة مع احداث الفيلم كانت في منتهي الإتقان

هتكلم شوية…

This was actually a pretty breezy 10.5 hours. I was surprised by how thoroughly this early work lays out the themes and motifs that Diaz has gone on to develop in his subsequent films. The connections to The Woman Who Left and Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery are especially striking. 

The entire film is fascinating but my favorite stretch is the long middle section where Diaz explores the gendered division of labor. Female farming and male gold-mining are compared at length. Picking stones out of rice is compared to panning for gold, for instance, and irrigating rice paddies is compared to digging a trench to facilitate gold panning.  Diaz’s cinema often involves collapsing real time and narrative time, and manual…