Audio transcription
John Quackenbush 0:00
May 15 2015, the Harvard Film Archive screened Storm Children, Book One. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the discussion that followed. Participating are HFA Programmer David Pendleton and filmmaker Lav Diaz.
David Pendleton 0:20
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm David Pendleton, the programmer here at the Harvard Film Archive. And it's a pleasure to welcome all of you to a real high point in our ongoing retrospective of the films of Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz. As you have no doubt noticed, this retrospective is spread out over almost two months, as befits a filmmaker of Lav’s prolific-ness and also given the special challenge and strength of his films—most of his films—which is their intensity and their length. Before I go on, I want to mention our partner in this program, that being Harvard's Film Study Center, a very special resource here at the university for students, and for visiting filmmakers. And we, together with the Film Study Center, are very grateful for the financial assistance from the Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities here at Harvard. Also a note, as always, please make sure to turn off any devices you might have on your person that might make noise or shed light while the screening is going on.
So we come to what is close to the end of what you could call a “mid-career retrospective” of Lav Diaz, who has been making films for something like twenty years now, and shows no signs of slowing down—becoming in the process one of the most celebrated filmmakers ever, I think, in the history of filmmaking in the Philippines. And this widespread international acclaim first started with what we could call, I think Diaz’ second major film as an independent filmmaker, Evolution of a Filipino Family from 2004. This is actually Lav’s sixth film—if I'm counting correctly—after after making first a few films, low-budget films on the fringes of the Philippines’ commercial film industry, before breaking out on his own. And one thing that clearly distinguishes Evolution of a Filipino Family and announces its ambition is its eleven-hour length. The adventurous critics, who took on the film, began praising it for its charging of the rise and or fall of a family from the countryside during the years of the martial law of the Marcos dictatorship. And the film really established the template for a number of Lav’s feature films which came afterward. The epic scope, the beautiful black-and-white videography, and storytelling done over a series mostly of long sequence shots. So not only has Lav come to be recognized as one of the most impassioned and ambitious of contemporary filmmakers, he's also served as a mentor to a whole wave of Filipino filmmakers who have emerged in his wake, including such varied figures as Raya Martin, John Torres, Khavn De La Cruz, and many others, whom we hope to feature in the near future here at the HFA.
But tonight, we're very happy to be seeing Lav’s most recently completed film, which is also Lav’s first feature-length documentary and perhaps one of his first purely nonfiction films ever—although many of the longer feature films often have pseudo- or semi-documentary aspects to them.
But one way to describe the film that we're about to watch—called Storm Children, Book One—would be to call it a documentary about the aftermath of the catastrophic typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest tropical storms ever recorded, which hit the northern Philippines in early November 2013 killing something like 7000 people and destroying hundreds of hundreds of thousands of homes. That is the storm of Storm Children, Book One. And the children are the protagonists that Lav focused on when he went to areas that had been hit by the typhoon to see what life was like there.
What we're going to see is a strikingly beautiful film visually, shot as usual for Lav Diaz in black and white, and also a film that asks us primarily, to watch and to immerse ourselves in it. Lav works very much in an observational mode here. There is no narration, there's no obvious point making; meanings emerge only gradually over the course of the film. It's less than two and a half hours, so it's practically a short in the scope of Lav’s work. Often the main meaning is the immersion in the duration in the flow of time and the flow of images and sounds itself. One thing that this means is that there's also very little dialogue in the film and even less of it is subtitled. There are subtitles, but you won't see the first subtitles until well into the middle of the film.
Anyway, I began by saying that tonight is a very special night. And that's not only because we're about to watch the New England premiere of this film, but also, we're very honored to have Lav Diaz here with us for the first of two nights to discuss his work. I think as you watch the film, it's tempting at first to see the film as a collection of impressions, a notebook or a sketchbook. But there's a constant tension in the film between the beauty of the images and the devastation and the utter impoverishment that they depict. And over time, the film's political point—as I think it's proper to call it—about the abandonment of a nation's most vulnerable citizens by their government, becomes inescapable. But that's all I'll say now. No more from me until some questions after the film. In the meantime, here to say a few words before he comes back for our conversation post-screening, please welcome filmmaker Lav Diaz.
[APPLAUSE]
Lav Diaz 6:53
Thank you to the Film Archive for inviting me here and for showing the works. [UNKNOWN]. Yeah. We'll talk after the film. Thank you so much.
John Quackenbush 7:24
And now the discussion.
David Pendleton 7:27
Lav Diaz!
[APPLAUSE]
Lav Diaz 7:39
So if you have questions, we can just drink outside. It's okay. [LAUGHS]
Unknown Speaker 7:44
Right, we can go outside and you can have a cigarette.
Oh, yeah, go ahead. Sure. That's as far as you can go, Lav, sorry. [LAUGHS]
Lav Diaz 7:58
I’ll stay here.
Audience 1 8:02
First, I wanted to say that was even better than [INAUDIBLE]
Lav Diaz 8:04
Oh, yeah? Thank you.
Audience 1 8:07
But my question is: your sequences put me in such a trance; I was wondering if when you're shooting them, do you become immersed in your own scenes, or [INAUDIBLE] hassles of filmmaking?
Lav Diaz 8:22
It’s everything, yeah, the hassles of filmmaking and of course, cinema. And, of course, you think about what's happening there with the kids.
David Pendleton 8:39
Can you say a little bit more about what it was like shooting unscripted?
Lav Diaz 8:46
When Haiyan happened, we intended to go there, but we waited for a while and after a month I started going there to visit.
David Pendleton 8:59
Where did you go exactly?
Lav Diaz 9:03
The center, Tacloban. The place is called Anibong. It's a barrio there, where there's like seven ships were taken by the water up on the land. It was hard because we went there like, five, seven times. I just started shooting, following the lives of these kids. You know, they're like eleven kids. I follow the lives of eleven kids so it's “Book One;” I still have to do things. There's a lot of footage.
David Pendleton 9:35
And did you know that you were gonna look for kids specifically?
Lav Diaz 9:39
No, no, I just went there to do some chronicling of the place, of what happened. And I started noticing the kids. Everybody was like doing the UNICEF, you know. The Israelis were there. The American GIs were there. A lot of NGOs and LGUs. But our kids are like, they're free. They're so autonomous. They're doing the things. So I started shooting the kids. I followed the lives of the kids there, yeah.
David Pendleton 10:13
When you shoot your feature films, I mean, did you find yourself doing things differently than you do when you…?
Lav Diaz
With this, no. It's so fluid. I just follow them. I stay there. Every time I visit, I stay there for like, two or three weeks. I follow their lives and then I get out and I come back again after a few months. So I just find them again. It’s so fluid and so natural, I find them.
David Pendleton 10:43
Well, it seems like there's a bit more handheld footage—a little bit more, I think, in this film, than–
Lav Diaz 10:48
Yeah, it was just the two of us shooting the film, me and my son. So it's the two of us, yeah. We went there, and then after a while, some help came, you know, some friends came to help do the shoot, to do sound.
David Pendleton 11:06
Are there other questions? I have a bunch more questions, but I don't want to stifle questions in the audience, if there are...
Audience 2 11:14
I mean, I have a lot of different questions, but I would prefer actually to go to one of the more generic ones I have, which is, you know, what pulls you into doing the longer kind of films? You know, what kind of drew you into that, in particular?
David Pendleton 11:29
What drew Lav towards making, like films that are six or seven or nine or eleven hours?
Lav Diaz
[INAUDIBLE]
David Pendleton
Well, in general, just thinking about your career as a whole, why did you decide to start making films that were–?
Lav Diaz 11:45
I just want to do it my way. I just want to do it my way. When I realized that I had this little tool, you know, maybe at least I can have some films to make. The biggest question is, what am I going to do? What practice will I follow? What model? I just made it fluidly. So I started doing my own framework, my own methodology. So I'm more comfortable with the long take, one frame take, so yeah, I started doing it. No restrictions, no compromises.
David Pendleton 12:22
At what point do you decide like how long a film is going to be? It seems like the lengths have gotten slightly shorter—on average, they've gotten a bit shorter, since this film is Book One, but you could have made it a longer film and incorporated Book Two–
Lav Diaz 12:36
Yeah, but there's, like, eleven kids, so I want to make like a forty-hour film out of this. But yeah, [LAUGHTER] this is the first edition of it, the first thing. There’s eleven kids, and I'm still gonna go back to them, find them, take care of them, you know, so maybe it's gonna be forty hours or sixty hours, I don't care. So I’ll just follow them again.
[SCATTERED APPLAUSE]
David Pendleton 13:06
But it seems like this is also a film about places, and I feel like we get a really detailed sense of the two main locations in the film. There's the street with the bridge, with the water flowing under it at the beginning, and then that whole neighborhood in Tacloban that's been destroyed. And I feel like there's a little bit more editing, in some ways, in this film than in your other recent films where it's often one shot, one sequence.
Lav Diaz 13:35
You see locations as some kind of a template for your aesthetic thing when you create something, when you organize your work. So you find recurring images, like the bridge, the river, the big ships that [are] out of the water. So you create this kind of template. It's the same as composing music. You do the refrain again and again, recurring things. So in this film, it’s the bridge, it’s the water, you know, some kind of repetition for an emotional pull, kind of anchoring your film to just bind the viewers to focus on what you want to see.
Audience 3 14:37
Were you tempted as in Encantos to add fictional elements to this?
Lav Diaz 14:42
With this? No, no, because Haiyan is so barbaric. It's a killer. The typhoon is really a killer. You don’t need any adornment or artifice to just say things. It's just there. Just show it and it's there.
David Pendleton 15:08
And the typhoon is a constant; often almost every so many of your films have a typhoon as a major narrative element.
Lav Diaz 15:17
Every year we’re visited by twenty to twenty-eight typhoons and big storms. We're the most typhoon-battered nation in the world. We have that every year. So it’s a vicious cycle of regeneration and trying to build our lives all over again. The Filipino life is like that. It's always about regenerations and trying to build things again out of these ravages. So it's a vast wasteland of so many things.
David Pendleton 15:55
Yeah, there’s a question back there.
Audience 4 15:56
I really like the film very much. And have a question about—a novice question, I guess—but about dialogue and the story, because behind each of those kids, there is a story. There is only in one case that you decide to ask about that story. And that story appears and it's the only moment I would say that we literally follow the kid. The [only] story we know. So I was wondering about your conception of dialogue, of telling the story that is behind this kid.
Lav Diaz 16:40
It's a shift, but you know, I'm being very fluid about it. I think it was the third time that I visited him, I couldn’t find him. I was in a panic. Finally, I found him under this ship, and it's very dark. And they don't even really care and I started asking them questions again, just to pull them out of whatever defenses they have. So I want to pull them out again and start talking about this story again, because it's important that we tell their story.
I shifted the kind of paradigm, the kind of model that I wanted. I just want to shoot them but then they’re gone, so I started looking for them a third time. I went there and then I found them and I was in a panic that I'm going to lose them—the two kids—so I started asking questions, the very conventional way of doing it.
David Pendleton 17:42
So had you been interacting with the people you were filming very much before then? Is there a lot of other footage that shows you interacting?
Lav Diaz 17:50
Yeah, I have a lot of footage, but at the start I was just very detached. I was just shooting them. They didn't care really that I was shooting them. If you see them when I started, they were like working under this big ship. They don't really care. When the camera is very near, they don’t care. Because UNICEF, the Israelis are there, the Italians are there, all the NGOs are there, so they don't care. They're so tired of this media thing, all this fiesta and you know, so they just don't care. They won't even notice you there.
David Pendleton 18:27
Oh, so the kids didn't mind you filming because they were so used to–
Lav Diaz 18:30
Yeah, after the storm, but after a while we became friends. Yeah, that's when I started to panic when I didn’t see them.
David Pendleton 18:38
And who are those two? I don’t know if they're Americans, Australians... No, there's three: two women and the guy that you see playing with the kids at one point?
Lav Diaz 18:49
One guy is a missionary. There are missionaries there. One guy’s from UNICEF and one guy is a GI, an American soldier. They're helping. They help a lot there. This is a big devastation. There’s these two islands, Samar and Leyte. It's not just Tacloban City. There's two provinces that were ravaged by this huge, huge typhoon. Samar and Leyte.
David Pendleton 19:22
Right. Can I ask you a little bit more about the editing in the film?
Lav Diaz 19:27
It's kind of hard because I have like, hundreds of [hours of] footage, you know. So for Book One, I chose Jonjon, Dondon and Philip—these three kids—and this peripheral kid, the fourth kid, so it's gonna be hard if I put everything in. It [would be] be fifty hours or sixty hours. You [would be] be dead by now. [LAUGHS] So I decided to just make chapters for this film just for kids. I followed the lives of eleven kids for this film.
David Pendleton 20:05
But a lot of the long takes that you have, we're often in some sort of suspense about when they're going to end, we don't necessarily know exactly when they're going to end. And often the cut is unexpected, and it's very impactful in a way. Each cut almost comes as sort of a surprise or a shock. And I'm wondering, when you're working in the editing room, what kinds of ideas do you have about when it's time to end a shot and begin another one?
Lav Diaz 20:38
I don't even know! I feel like I'm just finding the rhythm and just try to find a trajectory where there's gonna be a narrative about these kids. So at the end of the day, just follow it chronologically, where I followed them. It's time and space, you know. It's the dates that I followed them. So I don't want to distract from that. So it's very chronological.
David Pendelton 21:08
And what’s the name of the kid who's carrying the water?
Lav Diaz 21:11
It’s Jonjon, a battered kid. Really, really battered, yeah. He has like eight brothers and sisters. The father is super macho. He batters the wife every day and the kids every day. So the habitat is really depressing already and within the microsystem of his own family, he is battering the wife every day. You know, at some point, I want to kill him actually. [LAUGHS] Watching him do these things. You want to kill him.
David Pendleton 21:51
But the sequence where we watch him carrying the water is again, I mean, it's interesting, it's something that you do that I haven't seen you do in a lot of the films recently, where you very carefully edit shots together so that we get a sense of exactly what the trajectory is.
Lav Diaz 22:07
Yeah, it's very hard to do the cut because there's a lot of footage. That kid Jonjon doing the water, it's an everyday thing for him.
David Pendleton 22:16
Right. Several times a day, I imagine.
Lav Diaz 22:17
Yeah, so you have to choose the right cut for that. And there's really a lot. At some point, he was like, breaking; he couldn't carry the thing anymore, but it really exploited it for me, so I just took it off from the film. I just wanted you to just see some things.
David Pendleton 22:37
What was it that you decided to leave out that you thought was exploitative?
Lav Diaz 22:40
There were parts of the film where he would be carrying the thing and he would fall down. Too exploitative for the film, so I just took it off. Just too much for it.
David Pendletpn 22:51
Right, right. Do you think that that kind of editing might carry over to your future projects—again, where there is more a sense of continuity, as opposed to–
Lav Diaz 23:03
I don't know, it's always that kind of problem. You have that kind of dilemma on editing, the choices that you make. Again, it's like music, you want to show everything, yet at the same time, you want to find the right rhythm for the film.
David Pendleton 23:23
Absolutely. Thanks. There's a question back there, if somebody could give him a microphone.
Audience 5 23:32
Yeah, this was really good, and I really liked some of your other films that I've seen here. And following up on this rhythm thing, and maybe the long-sequence shots. One thing that I noticed in this, in particular, was you have the same place with long shots, and then you change positioning on the same place, but it's slightly different and at a slightly different angle. And it's really neat, because it gives you a different sense, even though it's the same place, you get this very different sense. And I think that those long sequences allow you to sort of absorb that and have a better sense of that coming through. Otherwise, if it's too short, I think a lot of that would just blow by. In fact, it was a couple of times when I was thinking like “wow, this is exactly the same place; it's just shot from this angle or this angle or over here.” And you get this total different sense. And I'm thinking like if you were there in real time just walking along, you'd probably not even notice a lot of this or it would just blow right by you. So I just think that's really, really neat and that falls into this idea of being able to do long shots and of course increase the length of the film, but that really kind of gives the viewer the ability to just sort of sink in with these these things in a way you would never have if you didn't take that lingering effect.
Lav Diaz 25:14
Yeah, the key is, you have to be there, you have to live there. So I was able to do that, because I lived there, I stayed there for a while. Every time I visited, I stayed for like, two or three months, just waiting for something to happen, or you know, just having discourse with these people, and if something comes up, you just put “record” on. The repetition makes the static templates so cool with that. You're there. You won’t lose anything if you’re there. You just stay. You're shitting and eating with them, and it's okay. So yeah, that kind of template happens, because you are there. I stayed with them for five times, seven times, and I just sit there and sit all day and then wait for something to happen, and wait for Jonjon to start work and have a soup with him, eat some rice and talk with him. I deleted the parts of the film where I have some kind of discourse with his kids. Also, at some point, we became friends, you know?
David Pendleton 26:34
And why did you decide to delete those things? Or will you include them in one of the future...?
Lav Diaz 26:41
It's a bit manipulative, but you know, it's Book One, so…
[LAUGHTER]
David Pendleton 26:48
I see, I see. You're saving some–
Lav Diaz 26:49
I need some kind of continuum for the project, so you know… You will come back again and watch them. But I love these kids. We've created some kind of relationship, we're still communicating. We created some hedge fund and trust fund for them. We're sending them to school now. With the money that we're getting, it's for them.
David Pendleton 27:15
That's great.
Steven, did you have a question?
Steven Brown 27:20
During some of the longer sequences—well, some of the sequences of the kids, the boys, sort of rummaging through the debris, I almost felt like you were on an affectionate level, on some level, identifying with the kids as the sort of filmmaker-as-scavenger. Is that sort of true? And I think there's pleasure in that; it's not a criticism. But did you feel sort of like you were scavenging with them?
David Pendleton 27:54
Well, there I think the question is for instance, the scene where we see the two kids digging on the beach. And there's this sense of like, rummaging through all of this material, if there's a way in which you–
Lav Diaz
It was exactly the first meeting. I was just walking around, and I saw them doing that. And I started shooting. They didn’t care.
David Pendleton 28:18
So you hadn't even spoken to them.
Lav Diaz 28:19
Yeah, yeah, at some point, one of the kids was like [giving me] the finger. [DAVID LAUGHS] “Fuck you. You're like a UNICEF thing, or an Israeli thing or Italian GI thing. We don't care. We just want to find something to…” They're making like 300 pesos every day from these diggings. They're very autonomous. They're free. They have their own lives. They don't care about all those, you know, “We got like ten billion,” you know, all the aid from outside, but the kids are forgotten. It's for the politicians and all those guys. Even the NGOs, I can’t say much about them. They're like, doing their own thing. The kids are just left out, so focus on them. That was the first day. I saw them digging those things.
David Pendleton 29:22
Can you say a little bit about shooting in black and white? I mean, you've been shooting black and white for a long time. But particularly in the case of this film, because I was saying earlier, I saw photographs of Tacloban, like some of those places—color photographs—and the experience of watching it in black and white is very different. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about why black and white for this film in particular?
Lav Diaz 29:46
It’s a very natural thing for me. I love black and white. I grew up watching a lot of black and white films. I have an overload of that. I grew up watching eight movies every week. It's always black and white, down south of the country. So I see cinema as black and white. So it's very natural. There's no theoretical thing or discourse about it. It's like, I just love black and white, and not being nostalgic about it, but I just love black and white.
David Pendleton 30:15
And do you see a tension between the beauty of the image and the content of the image? And what for you is fertile or creative about that?
Lav Diaz 30:27
I discourse on that because I don't want this aesthetic issue to overwhelm the whole thing, like the struggle, these kids. The shots are so beautiful, but you see there’s a struggle. So sometimes it’s kind of hard, on my part, as a filmmaker to see it as like, it's a beautiful shot. But you see, this guy is like, he's in hell. You know that kind of irony when you see this beautiful shot, but there's some struggle and it's, yeah, life is black and white anyways.
So you have that kind of discourse, even me as a maker of this film, I have that struggle: am I going to show this as beautiful as this? The shots are beautiful, but then it's hell in a way. So it's just about hell, the vicious cycle of life in our country. All this dilemma of being forgotten and being devastated by these things, nature and our system. Both ways.
David Pendleton 31:41
Right. The governmental neglect in a way completes the destruction that that nature started. But there's a way in which also, I mean, the fact that you're making film, that you’re making moving image already blocks certain things out for us. For instance, like, we can't smell things, we have only a very strict boundary to what we can see.
Laz Diaz 32:05
Yeah, I wish I could have the whole cut for you guys to see, but this is the beginning of the film actually, so wait for thirty-nine hours to come. [LAUGHTER] There's a lot but you know, it's really hard to cut it. Even when we're shooting, I couldn't see anything because I'm crying shooting the kids. It's hard to shoot that way. Just let the camera do it. Technology. But you know, the camera caught it anyway. So it's hard during the shoot, you’re just weeping every time. It is very hard. So the kind of blurry thing extends to the praxis and the methodology that you do and then the cutting, and to you guys experiencing the thing, but it's just the beginning anyway, so wait for the thirty-nine hours.
David Pendleton 33:01
It seems to me that one of the times when we get a sense of you behind the cameras when we hear you coughing. We never hear you weeping at the end, but we do hear your coughing towards the end.
Lav Diaz 33:11
I mean that last shot was very hard because it was raining hard the whole day, and–
David Pendleton
Were you standing near the water?
Lav Diaz
It's near the water. The steam is really hot. You know that did but dead bodies are there beneath you. All the dirt is coming out. And you see this beautiful shot. The following day, I was in the hospital, I had pneumonia. And the doctor said, “You're going to die. You have a lot of microbes in your lungs.” That's what it is. You shoot this thing. It’s very dangerous, but at the same time, you have to catch this thing. So it's like when we were shooting that thing, it’s like steaming hot, the rain is coming on, and then the steam is coming out of the ground and it’s just like two months after the devastation.
David Pendleton 34:10
I think Ernst had a question. And then there's a couple of other repeat questions.
Ernst Karel 34:16
First, building on what you both were sort of saying about what's apparent to the senses and what's not apparent to the senses. One of the things that I found so incredible about it, in terms of the sound is that the sound is—the vast majority of the time—telling us about what's not on screen, you know, so the sound is really what's filling in our whole contextual information about what's going on where they are.
And you've said a couple of times about how you think of rhythm and music while you're editing and it definitely seems that the pacing of the sound also plays into the rhythm of the editing.
Lav Diaz
Natural sound.
Ernst Karel
I always felt that there were these various climaxes and pacings that were going on with the combination of the sound and image. But at the same time, I was noticing that there's no sound credit at the end of the film, and it seems like maybe you're not actually–
Lav Diaz
This is the camera...
Ernst Karel
So yeah. So that's fascinating that the sound is such an incredibly big part of what's going on, and it's almost a byproduct of what you're doing visually, it seems like, or are you listening as much as—you probably are listening as much as you're watching while you're shooting?
Lav Diaz 35:32
I didn’t clean anything; it’s the sound caught by the camera, so it's very natural.
David Pendleton 35:39
But are you listening to the sound as it's being recorded while you're filming?
Lav Diaz 35:43
No, no, no, we were just shooting. But of course, I know the how to do the thing so the sound would be on the level with what it’s getting, what's happening.
David Pendleton 35:54
Also the wind, especially early on in the film, I feel like the wind is often a very important presence, just simply from the soundtrack and the distortion.
Lav Diaz 36:03
To a sound guy, it’s gotta be annoying.
Ernst Karel
[INAUDIBLE] It’s incredible!
Lav Diaz
Yeah, what the camera caught, we just put it in. We didn't clean anything. I was coughing hard on film, but it's okay.
David Pendleton 36:25
Did you have a second question? And then Robert has a question. And then you. Go ahead.
Audience 2 36:31
Just trying to piece together, you know, it's interesting, I was thinking of just kind of how you do such a fantastic job with, we can say, “distance and proximity” emotionally from the spectator’s point of view. A lot of your shots, as we know, they have a long duration, and there seems to be oftentimes a lot of distance, let's say a distance. And what I find interesting is, we can see this notion of kind of like distance and proximity, let's say, towards the end where in general, we don't have sometimes we don't even have sound, or you slow down the image, so it's just going in a direction even towards photography, so much so that you say “photographed by Lav Diaz.” So often when I watch the films, I'm trying to figure out what people are doing. It's interesting, it's like, “What is everybody doing? Like, what is what's actually happening?” And, it's kind of like this riddle, like, how I can kind of identify with them at times, because I can't really have access to them. But sometimes I feel like I do, like when you have the stream in the beginning. And, I think we get access to the forms that are presented in the images. So when we see, for example, one of the images where they're at the bridge in the beginning and you see the stream, there's this one perspective, where we can see the actual ledge of the bridge that creates this angle where it's almost like this, you know, we can channel in with them. But once we get a frontal view, it's a completely different kind of feeling. And I don't know if it's exactly a question, but there was a close-up right towards the end, and I thought that was very interesting. I was wondering what you were thinking or why you got this very close camera to the young boy towards the end. I felt like from my point of view that had a very strong resonance for me, for those reasons, like I said, because of the distance...
Lav Diaz 38:55
Thank you for that. One thing that [helped] the shooting was that everybody was shooting them, so they don't really care anymore. CNN went there. And the BBC was there, everybody was there, like Fox and everything. All media from all over the world just went there. So people don't care about cameras anymore. So I was free to just move… long shot, close-up... So I was able to do my thing in a very detached way because they don't care. Yeah, so that kind of attitude from these kids helped the film very much because I caught them in very unguarded ways. It’s your life going on. But because it's two months of relentless shooting from CNN and BBC are everywhere. You just don’t care anymore, and when we got there, we had some great angles for them. And, you know, we caught them fluidly with what's going on with their lives.
David Pendleton 40:08
When you edit the film, are you also thinking about the way that you're bringing the spectator closer to the children over the course of the film? At one point, like when we start to get close-ups in the middle of the film, I sort of felt like the whole first half was like this sort of long, slow zoom, where we're sort of gradually, gradually getting closer to the situation and closer, and then suddenly, finally, everything kind of clicks in the middle, and we feel like we're there.
Lav Diaz 40:34
When I started shooting, I kind of checked them out, if they're gonna react with the thing, because when I ID a kid, I'm gonna follow this kid. First, I’m just observing them before I shoot them, and then I started shooting. But when I realized that they don't really care about the cameras anymore, I got so comfortable with what I'm doing. I can do the close-up, I can do a very full shot, a long shot and a medium shot, everything. There's just so so used to the cameras, after two months of relentlessly being shot by all media from all over the world. So that helped the film. Yeah. You see, all this media from all over the world. Because it's cataclysmic. That thing was so cataclysmic. The devastation was so vast. 7,000 people died, 6,300 people died. This is the strongest typhoon recorded in modern history, so yeah... They’re so used to it.
David Pendleton 41:44
But that raises a question, actually, about the timeframe when you're shooting, because I'm assuming that—because you went there several times, and you were there for a few months each time—I'm assuming that by the end, the rest of the media had taken off and it was pretty much just you shooting there.
Lav Diaz
Yeah, by the time that I ended the shoot, everybody was like having red wine in one street. [LAUGHS]
David Pendleton 42:04
Everybody was what?
Lav Diaz 42:11
Having red wine. There was a long stretch of road in the middle of the city where it became so gentrified—all media from all over the world, all the Israeli armies and the GIs and all the Arabs. Everybody was drinking. Every night, there was red wine. They were having fun. So they got used to all these things.
David Pendleton 42:34
So then they were still there, that foreign presence was there...
Lav Diaz 42:37
There was a lot of money. There is an overload of aid now there, so everybody's getting fat. Except for the kids, of course.
David Pendleton 42:46
I see. Right. Right.
Robert, did you have a question?
Audience 6 42:52
Actually, I have a couple of questions. The first one you just touched on was, what was the timeframe of your film, vis a vis, the time of the typhoon? In other words, how long after did you start and then when did you finish?
Lav Diaz 43:09
The typhoon came in November 7 of 2013. I went there January of 2014. I wanted to go right from the start. But it's so exploitative to go there right at the very start of the thing. So we waited. I went there in January and then went back again the second quarter of the year and the last quarter of the year. I went there like five times, seven times? Two-month gap, three-month gap. Yeah, it's like eight or nine months. And I'm just shooting actually. Just shooting. I’m following these kids.
Audience 6 43:56
So I was just curious about the condition of the housing there. I mean, it looks like some of the houses were there from before the typhoon, but are most of the structures just makeshift, after the typhoon, or were people living like that before the typhoon as well?
Lav Diaz 44:13
Well, they did some kind of a zoning, so there's a lot of makeshift housing. And the major problem is a resistance from the populace and the victims themselves. They don't want to leave their places. The government is ready to relocate them somewhere—some kind of a zoning thing—but their lives are attached to the shore, to the port. So they don't want to leave. There’s kind of a resistance. So it's a big issue, actually. It’s a big problem. Houses are being built somewhere, but these people, they don't want to leave their places. So it's a big issue. How do you relocate these people now? So it’s a big problem right now. They're trying to solve it. They’re trying to solve that kind of thing. They made a zoning where fourteen meters from the shore, you can build your homes, but people are building their homes one meter away from the store. So it's a very Filipino thing. They don't care about laws. It's a big issue of the stubbornness of the population. At the same time, the system is trying to change the thing, some kind of zoning, but I don't know if it's gonna work. Negotiations are going on.
Audience 6 45:37
But before the typhoon were the houses more permanent?
Lav Diaz 45:44
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a big city!
Audience 6 45:47
But I meant in that neighborhood that you filmed.
Lav Diaz 45:48
Yeah, Tacloban is a big city. The devastated areas are Tacloban City, and three towns in the neighboring island—MacArthur, [UNKNOWN] and [UNKNOWN]—these are the devastated areas. But the thing is, the people didn't want to leave the places. It's a big issue, actually. The fundamental issue right now is relocation. If you want to talk about aid, there's a lot of aid. There’s a deluge of aid. There’s an overload of aid. Actually, people are getting fat. You check their homes, they have ten to fifteen sacks of rice there, a lot of canned goods from all over the world. But the thing is, they don't want to leave their places.
David Pendleton 46:33
So the government won't let them put up a new permanent house, but they don’t want to move.
Lav Diaz 46:38
The government is trying to relocate them, and they don't want to leave their places.
David Pendleton 46:44
Is that why some of the places that we see our tents, basically?
Lav Diaz
Yeah.
Audience 6 46:48
And were people living on the ships as well?
Lav Diaz
What’s that?
Audience 6
Were people living on the ships like up in the headquarters of the ships?
Lav Diaz 46:59
[INAUDIBLE] Yeah. They're like nine ships that went–
David Pendleton 47:05
But people were living on the ships before the storm. I mean, I'm assuming those were actual working vessels before that.
Lav Diaz 47:09
Because Tacloban City is a center of merchandise. The Visayas Islands are in the middle part of the country, and Tacloban City is a major port. There are two major ports in the middle part of the country: Cebu City and Tacloban. Economic activity starts in Tacloban on the eastern side. So it's hard to relocate these people. The economic activity starts from there. So it's a big issue there.
Audience 6 47:50
People are the people in the neighborhood, using the ships as shelter? Like have they taken them over for their houses?
Lav Diaz 47:58
Yeah, yeah, yeah…
David Pendleton
They live on the boats?
Lav Diaz
They live on the boats before they have houses because it's a port area. It's a port area where big ships come. They upload all the goods for the middle part of the country. It's a big shipping center. But they know, they know. During the [?spice?] times, that storm came, that big storm came and during the American time—this is the first part of the 20th century; I think it's 2007, 2008—it's the headline in the States, this big storm came also during this period. That city was devastated by a big storm, by a big typhoon. So it's a vicious cycle. But people didn't want to leave. They don't want to leave that place. It's the center of economics for the area of the country.
David Pendleton 49:05
Other questions? Okay, one last question.
Audience 7 49:18
I don't know if this was a plan or in the editing after the fact or if it’s my imagination going off the rails, but it seemed like there was an arc to this where at the beginning, there's the children scavenging mostly. Then it moves to a kind of family life, working, chores, dealing and trying to cope. And then it moves to like passing time, maybe like since the economy's devastated, there's nothing really to do and you're just sort of passing time and then it moves finally to play at the end where the children are playing, jumping off the boat and stuff. I was just wondering, does that even make any sense?
Unknown Speaker 50:01
Oh, yeah, yeah. Of course, as a filmmaker you want to articulate things, you want to find some narrative. So I was trying hard to do that for this film, because there's a lot of footage. You have 1,001 choices for every cut that you make. So yeah, it's a struggle to make some narrative out of it. So for this first part, there's a choice. These are choices, some kind of a narrative arc, you know.
David Pendleton 50:33
Great. Alright, well, I want, at this point, to thank you, Lav, for being here.
Lav Diaz
Thank you.
David Pendleton
Thank all of you guys. Come back tomorrow! We'll be seeing a couple of fiction films by Mr. Diaz. Thanks again.
©Harvard Film Archive
