D is for Lav Diaz, A-Z of Filipino Cultural Exports
b. 1958. We live in a post-internet age, as such we want questions to answers immediately. Our broadband providers update our internet speed, thus we accelerate. We want things now. Being forced to wait we become impatient. Through technological advancement, have we forgotten how to be patient?
Lav Diaz shows us how in slow cinema. Arguably a resistance to the status quo, slow cinema challenges the pace of modernity, celebrating a deferred pleasure through the act of looking. Diaz is a disciple of Lino Brocka, with his films taking on a social realist tone, giving voice to the plight of the Filipino’s who suffer in poverty, as a result of continued political corruption.
Surveying ‘Rotterdam International Film Festival’ 2015, Dan Kidner, Artist Moving Image Curator and Critic, notes Lav Diaz’s new film Storm Children: Book One, 143 mins, 2014. The film explores both environmental and physiological spaces, in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan 2013. This article can be read at the Frieze blog.
#OFW more than a country of good looking, half-wit, opportunistic terrorists
