Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors
(Makikiraan Po)
Acclaimed filmmaker and slow-cinema practitioner Lav Diaz (Magellan) returns to the Festival with his latest opus. Set in 1617, Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors examines 17th-century Imperial Spain’s forceful colonization of The Philippines. The film tells the story of Padre Enciso, a Spanish priest with a sinister charge to convert the country’s predominantly pagan population to Catholicism and establish the dominance of the Church at any cost. Desperate to finish erecting a church, Enciso orders his new congregants to transport a cartload of marble through a dangerous stretch of jungle occupied by marauders.
Diaz continues to chart the evils of colonial brutality, offering this potent meditation on the violent legacy of architecture built at the cost of native lives. Shot in stunning black-and-white, the film’s novelistic structure and deliberate pace combine to create a thrilling treatise on the ruthlessness of European territorial ambition.
