The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“A curiously oblique film that builds almost imperceptibly, Lav Diaz’s five-hour Batang West Side—at once deadly serious and howlingly absurd—is a masterpiece. Mesmerizing from first frame to last.”

Ronnie Scheib, Variety

Filipino auteur Lav Diaz employs the strategies of long-form filmmaking to explore story and character on a scale closer to the novel. His international breakthrough, 2013’s sweeping crime epic Norte, the End of History, had some critics balking at its four-hour length. But Norte was only the latest (and shortest) in a series of tome-sized works dating back to Batang West Side, his riveting and, until now, scarcely seen fourth feature. A monumental police procedural set in winter-scourged Jersey City, Batang chronicles the murder investigation of a teen (Yul Servo) shot dead in the street. As pavement-pounding detective Juan (Joel Torre) assays the mounting evidence, a portrait emerges of a Filipino diaspora whose alienated youth have turned to drugs and gangsterism. Don’t let the five-hour runtime scare you—this is an expertly crafted, ​“slow cinema”-bucking policier that trades in big themes and even bigger cumulative rewards.

In English and Tagalog with English subtitles

“One of the legendary unseen works of Philippine cinema … A major turning point in Diaz’s evolution as an artist.”

Gil Quito, Direk: Essays on Filipino Filmmakers