Coming soon: A Lav musical and gangster flick

Lav Diaz

Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, who won the Golden Lion for “Ang Babaeng Humayo” in Venice last year, has two new movies in the works: a musical and a gangster film.

A song-and-dance movie and a crime flick mark a clear departure for the auteur, who is renowned for epic, marathon meditations on his beloved and blighted country.

According to Lav, the musical is “Panahon ng Halimaw,” while the gangster movie, “Kung Wala na ang Alon.”

He told the Inquirer: “While in Harvard (for a Radcliffe Fellowship), I was able to write many songs that turned into a musical. I just added some old songs and that became the context of the screenplay. I’ve been planning to do the gangster film for two years. But ‘Humayo’ got produced earlier.”

He told Moviemaker.com in an interview: “I won’t stop exploring the medium. My praxis now is not some dogma.”

He explained his aesthetics, thus: “I see cinema as black and white. I grew up watching a lot of black-and-white movies. I think psychoanalysis will tell you that this can be a form of fixation. The absence of color amplifies my childhood belief that cinema is an alternative universe. I am still that child … except now I am creating alternative universes, not just dreaming of them. The wide and long-take shot is my way of simplifying cinema, a more Zen way of looking at the medium—less manipulations and distortions.”