Biography

December 30, 1958 · Datu Paglas, Maguindanao, Mindanao, Philippines

Lavrente Indico Diaz

Often makes his films in black and white.

Long, static shots.

His films often have runtimes that exceed four hours.

Films deal with martial law in the Philippines.

Member of the International Jury at the 37th Mostra Internacional de São Paulo in 2013.

Recipient of the Prince Claus Award in 2014.

Member of the Official Competition jury at the 9th Vladivostok Pacific Meridian International Film Festival in 2011.

Diaz is one of the most productive directors of the 'slow' or durational cinema. His feature films, mostly running between 3 to 12 hours, could only be made with the new freedoms afforded by inexpensive digital technologies. Diaz mostly used consumer-level HD and DSLR cameras to shoot his movies, often serving as his own cinematographer and editor.

Altogether, all of his feature films added up clock in at 7,162 minutes (or 119 hours and 36 minutes). This is roughly 5 whole days worth of footage.

We're labeled 'the slow cinema' but it's not slow cinema, it's cinema. I don't know why ... every time we discourse on cinema we always focus on the length. (...) It's cinema, it's just like poetry, just like music, just like painting where it's free, whether it's a small canvas or it's a big canvas, it's the same...[2016]

[dedicating his Locarno award] I want to dedicate this award to my father. He brought me cinema, he's a cinema addict, and he started this passion in me. For the Filipino people, it's for them, for their struggle, and then I would like to dedicate it to all serious filmmakers in the world, to Pedro Costa, he's my brother and I love his work, to Matías Piñeiro, and to the makers of all the other films in the competition. [2014]

I would go to any extent in my art to fathom the mystery of humankind's existence. I want to understand death. I want to understand solitude. I want to understand struggle. I want to understand the philosophy of a growing flower in the middle of a swamp.

[on Norte, the End of History (2013) and the 'flying images' used for dream sequences] It's called a heli-cam. It's a little device. You buy little propellers and put a camera in the middle. It's beautiful, man. People use it in sports, we saw it and said "ah yeah!" So we hired one. It's very expensive, he asked for something like $4000 a day, which is very expensive for this [low-budget] size movie. So we got it for only three days, so that was a lot, but I thought we needed it. [2013]