From What Is Before

At least since 2004’s Evolution of a Filipino Family, Lav Diaz has made it one of his prime tasks as a filmmaker to trace the effects of the Ferdinand Marcos regime on Filipino history and culture. If his recent triumph Norte, The End of History was a kind of allegorical retelling of Marcos’s youth, then From What Is Before, his magisterial new film (and winner of the Golden Leopard at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival), is a picture of what was lost—and what was killed—in the years leading up to the dictator’s 1972 declaration of martial law. The movie’s characters—a dutiful priest, a sullen winemaker, a herdsman raising an adoptive child, a young woman caring for her mentally ill sister, who is said to possess prophetic powers—live in a tiny village on the edges of civilization, reached by a single dirt road and fringed by a set of jagged cliffs. Into this old world, a new military order starts to intrude. A thrilling and utterly harrowing film, From What Is Before is one of Diaz’s finest works to date.