Evolution of a Filipino Family (Part 1)

This film will be screened in two parts: Part 1 on January 10 and Part 2 on January 11. Separate tickets are require for each part. Click here to buy tickets to both parts together and save!

The Filipino family at the center of Lav Diaz’s longest and most ambitious film seem, on paper, like players in a classical tragedy: a doomed, mentally ill mother; an embittered matriarch; an uncle easily seduced by power and wealth; and a young man, discovered in a dump as an infant, who takes a vow of silence after lashing out in a single, violent act. But the pace of Evolution of a Filipino Family—shot over a 10-year period, during which many of the actors aged dramatically, and set during the Marcos regime’s years of martial law—is entirely Diaz’s own. Scenes expand languorously before suddenly contracting to a concise climax; digital images and archival clips collide unexpectedly; rural time is slowly superseded by time as experienced in a city under lockdown. The result is an emotionally wrenching expression of one of Diaz’s thematic axioms: that history is something less to be lived through than to be weathered, survived, or endured.