Lav Diaz Unpacks Venice Film ‘Ancestors,’ Unveils New Projects

Lav Diaz is developing a film about false prophets and a screen adaptation of José Rizal’s “Noli Me Tangere,” the Filipino auteur reveals, alongside details on “Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors” (“Makikiraan Po”), his Spanish colonization drama premiering in the Venice Open section of the Venice Film Festival.

Diaz tells Variety, “Right now, I’m working on a film that discourses on false ideologies and false prophets.” He is also developing a separate project drawing on the writing of “Noli Me Tangere,” the Rizal novel credited with helping inspire the Philippine Revolution of 1896.

Diaz shared those plans alongside a discussion of “Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors,” which marks a return to Venice for the director. He won the festival’s Golden Lion in 2016 for “The Woman Who Left.” He arrives with the film following “Magellan,” which stars Gael Garcia Bernal as the Portuguese explorer and premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

“Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors” marks Diaz’s third excursion into a specific historical epoch, following “A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery,” anchored in the Philippine Revolution of 1896. This time, Diaz reaches further back, to the late 16th century and early 17th century, when Spanish forces under Miguel Lopez de Legazpi consolidated colonial rule after Legazpi’s 1565 arrival in Cebu, 44 years after Magellan first landed in the archipelago. Chieftain Rajah Tupas resisted the Spanish for nearly a month before Legazpi bombarded local villages, forcing Tupas into a settlement.

“It is an essential part of my continuing studies and dissection of my people’s struggle, or simply trying to understand the history of the Philippines,” Diaz says.

The film centers on the forced labor used to build the Philippines’ colonial-era churches, structures Diaz argues are steeped in violence despite their standing today as celebrated cultural and religious landmarks. Under Spanish rule, able-bodied Malay men, from teenagers to adults, were required to perform 40 days of unpaid annual labor on roads, bridges, churches, forts, piers, plantations, haciendas and mines.

“Forgetful Filipinos must learn, must know, must understand, that these structures were built by forced labor, and that they didn’t appear in their midst by some cosmic manifestations — it’s blood, sweat, tears, and deaths of our ancestors,” Diaz says.

He adds that, based on historical accounts, around 30% of the male population perished under the forced-labor system.

Diaz extends that critique of institutional power to religion itself. “Religion is one of the worst forms of violence,“ he says. “Faith can be a form of eternal subjugation, especially for the weak. Oftentimes, it blurs all of rationality; it becomes the truth of existence.” He points to the Crusades and the Holocaust as historical examples, and cites present-day conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Darfur as evidence of faith’s continuing entanglement with violence.

The film’s Filipino title — “Makikiraan Po” — comes from a phrase still used today by Filipino Malays passing through places believed to hold ancestral spirits. “I still do it, naturally, when I am entering a forest, a zone, when I am thinking of the unattainable,” Diaz says. “It is a connection, a relationship, with the ancient, with the primal, the pure.”

Diaz also traces the roots of the Philippines’ present-day class structure to the encomienda system, which King Philip II ordered Legazpi to impose in 1571. Under the system, indigenous communities lost ownership of their land while paying heavy tributes and performing forced labor for Spanish encomenderos. He says, “All the old rich families, landlords, hacienderos, political clans, big businesses, have their connection from the encomienda.”

Diaz shot “Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors” in black and white in Sampaloc, Quezon Province, marking his fourth production in the town, following “Magellan,” “Phantosmia” and the upcoming “Kawalan.” He credits the area with restoring his health after tuberculosis burst his left lung following the editing of “Magellan,” and again after he was later afflicted with severe asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

“The spirit of the place provides the best attributes I needed in my films on issues of truth, vision and transcendence,” he says.

Diaz cast filmmaker Isabel Sandoval, known for her own distinctive body of work, alongside longtime collaborators Ronnie Lazaro and Yul Servo. Sandoval plays the Babaylan, a traditional Malay healer who Diaz describes as a lasting bridge between Filipinos and their pre-Hispanic, pre-Islamic Malay heritage.

Diaz says, “She contributed majestic nuance in the whole vision of the Babaylan character, and I am truly grateful for her generosity.”

At 151 minutes, “Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors” runs shorter than many of the films Diaz is best known for, though he says his process didn’t change. “Nothing really changed with my praxis,” he says. “My principle has always been to work on the demands of the material at hand, to work around the conditions and situations. There’s never a fixed setup or framework. It’s just all hard work on the different aspects of the process really. The struggle to pursue a vision is the most important.”

He adds: “Cinema must have the responsibility to commit to the truth. There should be no compromise on that issue given the condition of the world right now. Cinema’s soul is the truth.”

“Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors” is produced by C’est Lovi Prods., Epicmedia Prods. and Sine Olivia Pilipinas, with Heretic handling world sales.