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Lav Diaz’s Norte, Hangganan Ng Kasaysayan screened on Sunday at Cinemanila to a nearly full house.

On the Sunday before Xmas, amid epic traffic, moviegoers paid Php300 each to watch an arthouse film that is four hours and ten minutes long.

On the Sunday before Xmas, amid epic traffic, moviegoers paid Php300 each to watch an arthouse film that is four hours and ten minutes long, and nearly everyone stayed until the very end.

We haven’t seen as many people at a mall screening of a Lav Diaz film since…never.

As the filmmaker would say: Wasak.

We’ve seen Norte thrice and will see it again. The next screenings will be held in January. We will post the dates.

Blue Christmas, an original video essay from the Criterion Collection.

Our jaws still feel a bit loose from having hit the floor every few minutes. The Act of Killing is a work of staggering chutzpah: consider the end credits, in which dozens of crew members prefer to be listed as “Anonymous”.

Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer invites the leaders of the Indonesian death squads that terminated millions of suspected communists in the 1960s to direct re-enactments of their killings. They do not deny that they killed people. They are not sorry. They casually, gleefully point out the scenes of the massacres and recall what they were wearing (jeans, never white pants).

They do not make excuses for their actions (No “I did it for my family/country” drama here—they do not have Catholic guilt). “What is true is not always good,” one unrepentant war criminal points out. “War crime is defined by the winner, and we are the winners.”

You’ve heard of “the banality of evil”. A man who figures out a way to kill people without making a bloody mess treats his pet ducks with great tenderness. He has never apologized for his role in the genocide, but he makes his grandson apologize to a duck for hurting its leg. Another murderer wears a series of glittering women’s gowns. In a musical sequence, a victim thanks his killer for sending him to heaven.

It will take us weeks to process what we’ve just seen.

Horrifically funny and extremely disturbing, The Act of Killing starts out as a film about political violence, explores what humans are capable of, then reveals itself to be a film about filmmaking. The killers confront history through the medium of fantasy, cinema, and perhaps the most amazing thing that happens is the sudden, creeping realization that they have committed a great evil.

Here’s the Cinemanila schedule for December 20-22.

At the SM Aura Cinemas

At the Director’s Club, SM Aura

Colin Firth, Natasha Richardson and Kenneth Branagh in the 1987 film adaptation of the novel by J.L. Carr.

If you’ve never seen Peter O’Toole act, watch Lawrence of Arabia now. (The screen is black at first because epic movies used to have orchestral overtures. Apart from being one of David Lean’s masterpieces, Lawrence is an interesting backgrounder on the Middle East situation.)

If you are very young, David 8 in Prometheus modeled himself on O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence.

Read Peter O’Toole, Last of the hard-drinking hell-raisers.