Vengeance is mine
Not content to sit long on his silver laurels Lav Diaz entered yet another film in yet another festival and this time struck gold--the Golden Lion in fact, given by the world's oldest film festival.
His second effort is a smaller film, focusing this time on a single woman rather than a broad swath of Philippine society, its milieu more recent (1997--Hong Kong had just been returned to China) rather than a crucial moment in the Philippines' past. But here again you sense that Diaz isn't just marking time--that he's shifted focus and approach from the mythical and broadly distantly historical to the personal and (somewhat) contemporary.
Yet another important shift is the source material: where Diaz's go-to writer has been Dostoevsky this time it's Tolstoy, using the basic premise of the latter's short story "God Sees the Truth, But Waits:" An innocent woman named Horacia Somorostro (Charo Santos) is accused of killing a woman and spends thirty years behind bars; when her best friend on the inside Petra (Sharmaine Centenera-Buencamino) confesses to committing the actual murder Horacia is unexpectedly released.
