Lav Diaz

He has won just about every major festival award: this year, Filipino director Lav Diaz is back at the festival with his newest work When the Waves Are Gone two years after he won Orizzonti award for Best Director for Lahi Hayop (Genus Pan) and six years after his breakthrough film Ang Babaeng Humayo (The Woman Who Left) which garnered him the Golden Lion. He sat down with his countryman Ruben Nepales for this exclusive interview.

“President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs was the big story in the Philippines and it was one of the biggest stories in the world, and cinema must bear witness. The bloody extra-judicial killings became normal after a while as people got inured to them.

Lav Diaz, who is known to be an avid supporter of the slow cinema movement with his usually more than three-hour feature presentations, recently added a feather to his cap with his Orizzonti win for Best Director of his unusually “short” two-hour black-and-white film, Genus Pan (Lahi, Hayop) at the Venice International Film Festival. The movie follows the lives of three Filipino mine workers as well as exposing the corruption of government authorities and questioning the notion of humanity.