OLAF MOLLER ON EVOLUTION OF A FILIPINO FAMILY

EVOLUTION OF A FILIPINO FAMILY will be shown this Saturday at 10.00 AM at Conference of Birds Gallery in Bangkok.

Olaf Moller wrote about EVOLUTION OF A FILIPINO FAMILY (2004, Lav Diaz) in Film Comment magazine, March/April 2005. Here is the excerpt from Olaf's writing:

"The festival's greatest film—and at 10 hours and 43 minutes, the longest—was Philippine filmmaker Lav Diaz's EVOLUTION OF A FILIPINO FAMILY, a high modernist epic about a family of farmers living for 15 years under a state of siege during the Marcos era. In one plot thread, a family member is hired to kill real-life filmmaker Lino Brocka; to study his target, he's given a tape of THE LOST BROCKA, a film directed by Diaz's BATANG WEST SIDE documentarist and moral catalyst Taga Timog, but is so moved by Brocka and his vision of his country that he is unable to go through with it—and is stabbed. In a single, soul-wrenching, mesmerizing take, a long bleeding stumble to his last breath becomes an awe-inspiring testament to the idea that the power of cinema belongs to the people. That such sentiments are evoked in a work which maybe only a handful of people will see is only a surface contradiction—Diaz's film isn't meant for any market, it's an offering to the director's countrymen, who will discover it in the years and decades to come. It's a labor of love made from the passing of time and echoes reverberating faintly across history's vast plains."

Film Comment's website:
http://filmlinc.com/fcm/fcm.htm

Information on Lav Diaz:
http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/2009/06/links-lav-diaz.html

Nuttorn's clip of Lav Diaz on Friday (most of the clip is in Thai)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PsZs_BrIOY
(Thanks to Merveillesxx who told us about this clip.)