Melancholia

Unfortunately, Lav Diaz will no longer be in person at this screening. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Love Lav? Get a discount ticket to this screening when you present your ticket stub to Norte, The End of History.

Winner of the Best Feature prize in the Horizons sidebar at the Venice Film Festival, this contemplative and nerve-wracking drama of personal reinvention and guerrilla warfare in the Philippines examines the fault lines between action and impact, how one intends to affect the world and the change (or lack of) that actually occurs. What starts as the story of a nun, a pimp, and a prostitute and their role-playing games expands and deepens to become an elegy for the power and imaginative vision of radical politics in an age of claustrophobia and reactionary cynicism, enlivened by strains of black comedy and noir-heavy fatalism. Diaz packs all this into his most complicated narrative structure yet, a soulful meditation on the difficulties of daily life and the petty delusions necessary to withstand the pain of it. The ailment of the film’s title seems to coat the stark black-and-white images themselves as Diaz’s characters attempt to combat their persistent feelings of meaninglessness and the enveloping boredom that only hours of make-believe, and sometimes a little human contact, can even begin to fend off.