Filmmaker Isabel Sandoval stars in the Filipino auteur's exploration of the origins of regional feudalism, which gradually builds to an immersive vision of the mayhem and mundanity of colonial cruelty.
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Courtesy of Venice Film Festival Set almost a century after Magellan first landed on the Philippine Archipelago, and coming just a year after “Magellan,” director Lav Diaz‘s last film, landed in Cannes, “Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors” is a description of bruised history rendered in the sharp, precise, scarring lines of a newly inked tattoo. In many ways a companion piece to “Magellan”‘s epic, full-color demythologization of the Portuguese explorer’s legacy, but in others a convex-mirror inversion that unfolds in crisp monochrome and embeds itself within the experiences of the everyday oppressed, “Ancestors” weaponizes the beauty of its setting in the seething, untameable jungles of Luzon island, against the ugliness of the newly unleashed colonial spirit of acquisition, exploitation and subjugation. Diaz lets the story uncoil slowly; disasters of this magnitude rarely happen in a hurry.
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