Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz on his latest 9-hour movie Magellan, and nearly dying
Slow Cinema’s Diaz, known for extremely long movies, often about death, talks about his unique directing style and surviving the Trump era
Earlier this year, Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz had a near-death experience, and not for the first time.
He was editing his new film, Magellan, when he began vomiting blood. “I almost died from tuberculosis. I vomited blood four times. It was scary,” he says.
When we met for this interview, the 66-year-old was sitting in a hotel in Doha, Qatar. “This is the first time that I’ve got out of the Philippines [since then],” he explains. “I’m still on medication.”
He seems entirely calm, but then he is no stranger to death.
Right from the start, I knew that there was going to be a lot of rejection of my kind of cinema.
Born in Columbio, Mindanao, Diaz grew up in a world where you would need to walk miles to see a doctor, where everything from crocodiles to the common cold could kill.
He almost died “at the age of four, the age of eight, and … in 2004 as well, I almost died of cancer. I still have the scars.”