There is no escape from history

Diaz calls his own films "very allegorical": each is a discourse on how history shapes human nature, and how each of us is its microcosm. "Everything is a consequence," he says — and from history, no one escapes.

In Fabian, the protagonist of Norte, the End of History, he sees the seed of a Marcos-like fascism — not a story from the past, in Diaz’s view, but a reality still in progress.

Life itself is melodrama

For Diaz, life is nothing if not melodrama. Emotion comes before reason, and though we keep trying to flip it into something intellectual, the melodrama repeats every day. A father out of work drinks; a friend sinks into addiction; a president embezzles a nation’s money — all that sorrow is what he calls "melodrama." Reality, he says, is the most primal facet of human existence.

There is no such thing as "international cinema"

There is no national cinema and no international cinema — only "cinema," Diaz argues. Just as Kurosawa’s Rashomon offers the relativity of truth, and Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses a critique of institutional values, across any culture. When borders and ethnicity fall away, what remains is the human being, and life itself.

The sickness of myth-making

Toward Magellan, Diaz goes further: the Philippines’ deepest problem, he says, is "myth-making." The national hero Lapu-Lapu may have been an invention of Rajah Humabon — the sources do not add up — and in that sense, he admits, the film becomes a kind of revisionism. The same machinery of myth, he argues, later produced demagogues from Marcos to Duterte.

Out of Mindanao

Born December 30, 1958, in Columbio, Cotabato, in the southern Philippines. His childhood unfolded amid the Mindanao conflict between Muslim armed groups and government forces, and the family moved to the calmer town of Tacurong. Raised by schoolteacher parents, he took an economics degree from Notre Dame University in Cotabato City in 1980.

He moved to Manila, taking odd jobs while writing about music and film and working on a newspaper comics page. A short story published under the pen name "Bahaghari ng Timog" (Southern Rainbow) won a 1990 Palanca Award. Before film, he was first of all a writer.

Into film

Diaz has said that encountering Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light (1975) under the Marcos dictatorship set him on the path to cinema. In 1985 he made Banlaw ("Cleanse"), a three-minute Super-8 short inspired by a self-immolating monk, and in the late 1980s he worked as a film critic for the Manila Standard. He later moved to New York to study filmmaking further.

His feature debut was The Criminal of Barrio Concepcion (1998). He began inside the studio system on low budgets, then broke out of it, becoming a filmmaker who shot on his own time, by his own method.

The long form, and the world’s attention

With West Side Kid (2001) and Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004) came the epic durations that would define him. Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) took a Special Mention (Orizzonti) at Venice, and Melancholia (2008) won the Orizzonti Grand Prize there.

His international breakthrough was Norte, the End of History, in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2013. From What Is Before (2014) then won the Locarno Golden Leopard; A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (2016) the Berlin Silver Bear (Alfred Bauer Prize); and, the same year, The Woman Who Left won the Venice Golden Lion.