Lav Diaz Agonistes
Grabung.

Wenn es einen Regisseur gibt, dessen Werk uns in jedem seiner Zustände interessiert, ist das Lav Diaz. Deshalb vermelde ich freudig, dass es vor rund einer Woche zur Aufführung seines neuesten Films Agonistes kam, noch in einer Work-in-Progress-Fassung (hier). Bislang habe ich keine Reaktionen darauf gefunden. Der Film erzählt von zwei Männern, die, hoffnungslos wie sie sind, nach einem Schatz zu graben beginnen. Eine Voraufführung von zwei - von avisierten fünf - Stunden Länge gab es im Oktober. Eine Beschreibung im Blog "persistence of vision", wo es - auch in den Kommentaren - mehr dazu gibt:

Quitting their jobs, they emerge in Bikol one day, purchase digging equipment and get to work. They meet Manoling’s brother who farms the land but whose wife Loleng is terminally ill with a lung disease. As the trenches deepen, Juan and Manoling only manage to turn up rusty metals and an old military boot. Manoling’s brother seems content to live a farmer’s life and jokes in the background about a share of the spoils. At dusk, all of them often – including the bed-ridden Loleng -- gather to watch the magnificent – otherworldly? – sunset.

Philbert Ortiz Dy meinte dazu:

Lav Diaz showed off two hours of his latest work-in-progress Agonistes. It’s difficult to comment on an unfinished film, but those two hours were actually pretty great, and might’ve been able to stand on their own as a feature with just a little tweaking. The movie is about two construction workers who get fed up with their life in Manila and decide to go to the countryside to try and find a treasure supposedly buried by one of the workers’ grandfather. The current full edit of the film is reportedly five hours, so a lot could change in the three hours that we haven’t seen, but what we did see was like Lav Diaz doing his own version of Waiting for Godot. That’s a project worth seeing really, and with any luck, we’ll get to see it soon.