In 2002 the director joked that his next feature—Heremias—was going to be forty hours long, the audience, with their eyes wide and bloodshot, didn't for a minute think that Lav 'i do whatever the fuck i want' Diaz was joking. Fortunately for the weak bladdered the runtime dwindled into the considerably less ten hours, for better or worse.

Torment begins on a desolate road, Diaz's style promptly radiating from each carefully framed shot, as ox carts and their forever ambulating artisan workers steadily pace with them. Modernity and commercial filmmaking speed past them in the form of a speeding van, Diaz in comparison saunters and lingers and ends the take long after the intrigue has left the sequence, leaving the…

85/100

Heremias may be one of Diaz's more straightforward narratives and also one of his less (directly) political ones, yet it is nonetheless as much of an 'ordeal' as the greater part of his oeuvre, clocking a solid 9-hours runtime featuring multiple extended static shots, one of which runs for a formidable 62 minutes. And yet despite everything―as always―the ends seem to justify the means, no matter how punishing or gimmicky they may appear initially, with Diaz ensuring that his protagonist's prolonged torment (both physical and spiritual) and world-weariness soaks down to our very bones, in a way that might have been impossible through any film of conventional length.

The titular character Heremias, an impoverished wandering peddler selling wares from…

#70HoursOfDiaz

Hours 24-34

I take back every criticism I had with Evolution Of A Filipino Family. In retrospect it's runtime seems rather humble in it's modest reflection of its participants. It's runtime may have tested my patience on occasion but at least that movie had an overall goal: to represent an average family in the Philippines over a span of time. Did it meander? Sure but fur all intents and purposes in retrospect I think it (mostly) succeeded at it's simplistic aims.

I bring this up because Diaz's follow up, this film is maybe the single worst film I have ever seen in my life.

I am willing to accept a lot from a "long" film but I think your…

Wishing to spend some time alone, a travelling handicrafts salesman decides to take his cow-pulled-cart and leave the safety of a wagon train, much to the bafflement of his wary colleagues. Before long, well off the beaten track, after spending a drunken night with a trio of strangers, their fears for him become reality, when he has his cow and wares stolen and his cart burnt to the ground. Finding the corrupt local police officer of no help, he stakes out the scene of the incident himself, hoping to catch the criminal (or criminals) red-handed. Instead, he overhears a group of teenaged boys planning to commit a horrendous crime, but struggles to find anyone willing to help him to prevent…

With an intricately woven tapestry of faith, moral decay of the Filipino society and authoritarian corruption, Diaz throws the most arduous challenge to his audience in Heremias Book One. However the strenuous efforts that one must expend to patiently sit through this nine hour long epic without any sorts of grandiloquence is oddly rewarding in the most contemplative sense of the word.

At the centre we have the eponymous 'hero' Heremias, a travelling tradesman and the conflict that arises out of his psychological derailment. But it takes nearly two hours for this friction to arise, two long hours consisting of a series of static long takes that teleports you into the serene Filipino landscape where many of the nomadic crafts…

When asked about creating empathy through immersion, Lav Diaz had this to say:

“Immersion is very inherent cinema. Once you’re into this very collective or very tribal exercise of just being in the dark and watching this alternative universe. It’s very immersive - just lose yourself with the story or following some characters there or following some feeling, this very abstract emotion. You can have various ways of immersing in cinema. It can be in a very very emotional way or just feeling some movement, trying to get that nuance of a little sunlight you see in the leaves. Some people moving there, not just even the main character. Just see some people passing in this background... it jars you…

85/100

Heremias may be one of Diaz's more straightforward narratives and also one of his less (directly) political ones, yet it is nonetheless as much of an 'ordeal' as the greater part of his oeuvre, clocking a solid 9-hours runtime featuring multiple extended static shots, one of which runs for a formidable 62 minutes. And yet despite everything―as always―the ends seem to justify the means, no matter how punishing or gimmicky they may appear initially, with Diaz ensuring that his protagonist's prolonged torment (both physical and spiritual) and world-weariness soaks down to our very bones, in a way that might have been impossible through any film of conventional length.

The titular character Heremias, an impoverished wandering peddler selling wares from…

I'm still new to the products of slow cinema but after watching a handful of masterpieces by Lav Diaz, I could finally dwell in his great contributions as one of the best Filipino filmmakers. The strange tale of Heremias spurred my curiosity, though it takes a lot of patience due to its long duration. The way he used dialectical approach in dealing with injustice is somewhat appealing to me. He conveys his ideas through metaphors connected to spiritual growth which is prominent in his works, as what I have observed in Butterflies Have No Memories. Yet, I can still recall some defining moments that distinguish it from the others. The stories of Colonel Oshima, Castro family and other folks of…