Lav Diaz

A young filmmaker is bent on recreating forgotten massacres from Philippine history, but when she begins shooting at a site where 1,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered, angry spirits are awakened and the lives of her team and the local villagers are put in peril.

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.

In this whimsical historical fresco, a counterpoint to today’s urgent political issues, the figure of the Filipino revolutionary Rizal is revisited in the light of early silent films.

An actor with an illustrious career decides to write, direct, and act in a film that will inevitably bring him closer to his own demise before revealing that his truth may actually be far from what he has become.

In dreary Porac Pampanga, a young man, Daniel, abandons his motherland after winning the biggest cash prize in the history of Philippine lottery. Five years later, he is searching for home and redemption through the people that make up his past. With each visit, his story unfolds like the last digit of a winning combination.

Driving around the streets of Cuba, Lav Diaz – the famous Filipino director – and Gustavo Flecha - a talkative Cuban taxi driver – find themselves discussing about politics, migration, social conditions and love; touching many personal stories and experiences, they create an historical affresco of the conditions of their own countries.

The Devil of Comparisons (original title: El Demonio de las Comparaciones), was a 30-hour black & white silent film from 1929 by Narding Salome Exelsio (1883-1949). It explores the cyclical lives, deaths, and rebirths of Jose Rizal and his characters (played by hitherto unidentified actors) in a wasteland ruled by demons.

A dreamer with a calm and minstrel attitude lays on the grass, recites a poem and makes an offer to a tree. Is he dreaming, or is he a part of a dream? A contemporary peasant dress in a nostalgic revolution’s uniform, goes with his work routine in the countryside, takes care of the cows and thinks about the meaning of death and dream. The real documents and fiction blends into the path of the characters in a rural area in Cuba, and becomes a metaphor of an island inside another island or a dream inside another dream.

"Life in 24 Frames a Second" is a film about hardship, misfortune, perseverance and triumph. The personal stories of John Woo (The Killer), Anurag Kashyap (Sacred Games), Rithy Panh (The Missing Picture) and Lav Diaz (The Woman Who Left), who survived extreme poverty, disease, sexual abuse, genocide and civil war to go on to become maestros of world cinema. 'Survivors' united by their abiding love of the movies.

A one-of-a-kind legacy project produced by TBA Studios, Habambuhay is a homage to the centennial anniversary of Philippine cinema–an insightfully entertaining documentary series, revisiting the personal experiences of those who work in front of or behind the cameras, those who have shaped the film industry of the Philippines for the longest time.