Special Screenings 2019

Season of the Devil

Lav Diaz I 2018 I 234'

SYNOPSIS

In the late 70s, a military-controlled militia gang terrorizes a remote village in the Philippines. The terror inflicted on citizens is not just corporal, but intensely psychological as well. They are constantly fed apocryphal tales about the village leader. A few souls fight, refusing to give up. Poet, teacher and activist Hugo Haniway desperately searches for the truth about his wife’s disappearance...

BIOGRAPHY

Lav Diaz

LAV DIAZ (Philippines, 1958) is a versatile artist. He started out as a guitarist, went on to write poetry and short stories, until he turned to film. Since the late nineties, he has devoted his life to this art until he became one of the most awarded independent filmmakers in recent years. In 2015 FILMADRID dedicated an exclusive focus to his filmography.

Multimedia

Critical text

Lav Díaz has defined Season of the Devil as an “antimusical” and a “rock opera”. The story of this great Philippine director takes place in the late 70s, a particularly bloody period of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, based on the actions of popular militias that wanted to eradicate any trace of communism. Each character express their feelings and emotions through songs as full of lyricism as stripped of ornaments, establishing an unequivocal mirror with the current reality of the Philippines under the authoritarian rule of Rodrigo Duterte. Diaz blows up the genre codes in order to develop an unstoppable speech about freedom, always with his raw and dazzling black and white composition and a time that expands until reaching the deepest representation of the human being’s brutality and restlessness. JAVIER H. ESTRADA

Technical Sheet