Henrico's Farm

Kagadanan sa Banwaan Ning mga Engkanto (English: Death in the Land of Encantos) is a 2007 Filipino television miniseries created and written by Lav Diaz. The five-episode drama would be edited into a nine-hour feature released in 2013. Philippine poet Benjamin Agusan hearkens back to his village Padang after seven years in Europe. Horrified to discover that the community has been buried under landslides, he wanders the countryside, reconnecting with friends, lovers, and family whose lives teeter on the brink of destruction.

A poet hearkens back to his Philippine village after years abroad in Europe. Horrified to discover that the community has been buried under landslides, he wanders the countryside, reconnecting with friends, lovers, and family whose lives teeter on the brink of destruction.

The start of the film sets the tone. A tortured man looks as if he will castrate himself. Later he staggers aimlessly and bleeding heavily through the streets of a town that is just waking up. In parallel, the film shows the marital discussions of a couple, with the husband hiding behind the camera.

Hilarion Zabala has a mysterious, recurring olfactory problem. A counselor/psychiatrist suspects a lingering case of phantosmia, a phantom smell, and possibly caused by a deep psychological fracture. One recommended radical cure is that Hilarion must go back and deal with the darkest currents of his past life in the military service. Reassigned in the very remote Pulo Penal Colony, he must also confront the horrific realities of his present situation.

The Philippines, 1972. Mysterious things are happening in a remote barrio. Wails are heard from the forest, cows are hacked to death, a man is found bleeding to death at the crossroad, and houses are burned. Ferdinand E. Marcos announces Proclamation No. 1081, putting the entire country under Martial Law.

When a Filipino teen is found fatally shot on the streets of New Jersey, the investigation into his death reveals the struggles of the Filipino-American community, including the horrifying effects of methamphetamine on its youth.

Spanning from 1971 to 1987, in rural areas under the Marcos regime, a poor farming family struggle to overcome challenges brought on by corruption and greed for power.

The Philippines is visited by an average of 20~28 strong typhoons and storms every year. It is the most storm-battered country in the world. Last year, Typhoon Haiyan, considered the strongest storm in history, struck the Philipines, leaving in its path apocalyptic devastation.

An embittered law student commits a brutal double murder; a family man takes the fall and is forced to take a harsh sentence; and a mother and her two children wander the countryside in search of some kind of redemption.

Three people start a strange therapy to escape their agonies. Each attempts to process those they lost during the Marcos dictatorship while examining their own grief.

A dog. A crow. Faith. Short film for Austrian Film Museum.

After three decades' wrongful incarceration for murder, a woman discovers that her friend and fellow inmate committed the murder of which she was accused. This leads to her release and subsequent discovery of the man who framed her — her ruling class ex-lover.

At the dawn of the modern era, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan leads an expedition under the Spanish crown in search of the first westward route to the Spice Islands. He embarks on a perilous journey across the uncharted Pacific, where his fleet faces starvation, mutiny, and the psychological toll of endless seas. Upon reaching the shores of Cebu, Magellan is pulled into a fatal conflict with the natives by his drive to spread Catholicism, culminating in his tragic doom.

First begun in 2006, WAKE (SUBIC) completes the documentary diptych, FOR EXAMPLE, THE PHILIPPINES, the first part of which, VAPOR TRAIL (CLARK) was released in 2010. Collectively this nine-hour essay explores circumstances of toxic contamination around the former US military bases in the Philippines as the locus for a meditation on historical amnesia, colonial privilege, and the consequences of unchecked militarism. Interweaving both cinéma-vérité and interview footage of Filipino victims and their families, environmental spokespersons, and community activists, along with early photographic material pertaining to the Philippine-American War, partisan songs, historical texts, and landscape photography, both films are an attempt to construct a work capable of rendering some measure of this human and environmental tragedy and the complexities of its remedy.

In a sophisticated near perfect society, citizens live with paper bags on heads to dissolve differences. Tensions rise when the whispers of a mythical land without the bags start to float and a fresh council member sparks an accidental revolution.

Erwin Romulo, the late Alexis Tioseco’s best friend, recalls the events after the critic and his girlfriend Nika Bohinc’s untimely death in their home in Quezon City. Diaz makes use of one long take to allow Romulo an uninterrupted narration of the events. The pain of recalling is palpable.