A pioneer and inspiration for the current independent film movement in the Philippines, Lav Diaz will be in Bangkok this week to help kick off a three-month-long series of screenings of his films in Bangkok and Phuket. The title really captures the spirit of it all: Death in the Land of Melancholia: Lav Diaz Retrospective in Thailand.

Diaz broke away from commercial filmmaking in 2002 when he made Batang West Side, which set the tone for the Pinoy New Wave movement, using digital cameras, experimental techniques and boundless running times. Diaz' other films include the 11-hour-long Evolution of a Filipino Family, which took 11 years to make, the mind-blowing Heremias Book One (nine hours) and the 11-hour Death in the Land of Encantos. His latest film, the seven-and-a-half-hour-long Melancholia, won the Horizons Award at the 2008 Venice Film Festival. I was pondering going to the Singapore International Film Festival to see it, but the dealbreaker came when it was pulled from the festival over censorship.

His films unhurriedly tell the stories of ordinary Filipinos, and have been made to record, argue about, and make a firm political stand on his own country.

"My films are not long. They are free," he said during his stay in Bangkok last year, when he was a juror on the Bangkok International Film Festival.

The retrospective will feature the two-hour-long Heremias Book II (rough cut), Melancholia, Death in the Land of Encantos, Evolution of a Filipino Family and Heremias Book I.

Heremias Book I, subtitled The Legend of the Lizard Princess, clocks in at nine hours, following a man named Heremias on his journeys. At the beginning, he and his magnificent white oxen are with a caravan of carts, travelling the countryside selling handicrafts. Abruptly, Heremias decides to set out on his own, against the advice of his cohorts. And thus begins his descent to where he is a voyeur, witnessing the loss of all that is moral and good in his country.

Death in the Land of Encantos, also nine hours, is set in an area that had recently been inundated by mudslides after a typhoon. A poet returns to his home village after spending time in Russia. His home has been wiped out and his family and many friends are gone. He manages to reconnect with old artist friends, but is haunted and he descends into madness. Where Heremias was about the loss of morality, Encantos is about the loss of artistic soul.

In Melancholia, running 7.5 hours, a prostitute turns up in a small town at the same time as a nun who has come to collect charitable donations. She meets a man who seems to be a pimp staging sex shows for customers. It turns out that the three know each other and at one time were revolutionaries.  They all share the loss of loved ones and friends. To try to overcome the trauma they assume the identity of others, but the more they turn themselves into someone else the deeper they sink into melancholy.

The 11-hour Evolution of a Filipino Family tells of two suffering peasant families connected through an orphan, Raynaldo. As a baby Raynaldo was rescued from a Manila street by a mad woman, and grew up in a family accused of having madness in the blood. Under Martial Law the family becomes separated: the grandmother and her granddaughters survive as farm laborers, Kadyo the head of the family is jailed indefinitely, and Raynaldo ends up with the other family whose mother is going blind. To try to raise the funds to cure her, the father and his sons abandon farming to work illegally in a goldmine controlled by gangsters. The story of the toil of Filipinos, told over decades, is cut with footage of historical events - demonstrations, the military's crackdown of protesters, and the assassination of Ninoy Aquino. "Painful to watch, and astonishing, this is one of cinema's greatest epics of the wretched of the earth," says the synopsis taken from organizer Filmsick's blog.

Taking place at a variety of venues over the next three months in Bangkok and Phuket, the retrospective is organized by Duangkamol Filmhouse (Filmvirus) in coordination with the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi's Bangkok CODE, Bioscope magazine, Conference of Birds Gallery, and BO(OK)HEMIAN. This week, venue was added -- the cinema at the Film Archive Public Organization of Thailand in Salaya, Nakhon Pathom.

Here is the schedule:


Friday, July 31, Bangkok Art and Culture Center

• 16.00 - Heremias Book II
• 18.00 - Discussion on the films of Lav Diaz and contemporary Filipino films with Lav Diaz, film critic Alexis Tioseco and scholar May Adadol Ingawanij,

• 12.00 - Melancholia (7.5 hours)

• 12.00 - Death in the Land of Encantos (9 hours)

• 10.00 - Death in the Land of Encantos (9 hours)

• Campus tour at Bangkok University

• 10.00  - Evolution of a Filipino Family (11 hours)

• 12.00 - Heremias Book 1 (9 hours)

• 10.00 - Melancholia (7.5 hours)

• 10.00 - Heremias Book 1 (9 hours)

• 09.00 - Evolution of a Filipino Family (11 hours)

• 12.00 - Melancholia (7.5 hours)

• 12.00 - Death in the Land of Encantos (9 hours)

• 12.00 - Evolution of a Filipino Family (11 hours)

• 12.00 - Heremias Book 1 (9 hours)