Dir: Lav Diaz | Drama 2026
Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors places Lav Diaz firmly back in the territory he has made unmistakably his own: the Philippine past as a living wound, history experienced not as something finished but as a presence still haunting the landscape and the people who inhabit it.
Set in 1617, under Spanish colonial rule, the film centres on Padre Enciso, a Spanish friar and encomendero charged with overseeing the construction of a church, while Indigenous communities resist the brutal system of forced labour, conversion and exploitation on which that monumental architecture depends. In the shadow of Magellan, Diaz once again turns his gaze towards the origins of colonial violence and the long afterlife of its consequences.
And yes, this is recognisably a Lav Diaz film. The patient, almost geological sense of time is there; so is his characteristic black-and-white imagery, in which landscapes acquire an extraordinary moral and historical weight if we allow ourselves to surrender to his unique sense of time and history.
Diaz himself handles the cinematography, editing and production design, and his images have that familiar austere beauty — figures dwarfed by forests, roads and architecture, the human drama unfolding with an almost ritual stillness.
But at around two and a half hours, it is strikingly concise by Diaz standards — indeed, it has been described as his shortest film in more than two decades. That relative brevity doesn’t mean he has abandoned his method. Rather, the long takes and silences remain integral to the experience: Diaz makes us inhabit history rather than simply receive information about it.
What emerges is a sombre meditation on colonialism, religious conversion and the violence concealed beneath supposedly civilising projects. The title itself sounds almost like a plea from the present to the dead — asking the ancestors not simply to remember, but to allow the living to pass through the history they have inherited.
After Magellan, this feels less like a departure than another chapter in Diaz’s continuing excavation of the Filipino historical consciousness. The difference is that the excavation is unusually concentrated here. The familiar Diaz patience remains, but the film feels leaner, more focused and perhaps more immediately accessible than some of his monumental earlier works.
VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2026