‘Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors’ Venice Review: Lav Diaz Revisits the Horrors of Colonialism

In the way Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz understands cinema, a 150-minute film can be considered a short. And this is not, or not necessarily, a joke about the fact that Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors is the Filipino filmmaker’s shortest film since 2011. The film’s very conception has something of a short film about it, at least in relative terms. What it tells is strikingly brief and simple, and in the hands of a more conventional filmmaker, it could easily have been a short. Measured against the narrative poetics of the director of Magallanes, these 150 minutes function like one.

The implications are many —political, historical, religious— but the story presented in Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors is a simple one. It takes place in 1617, when the Spanish Crown controlled the Philippines. Father Enciso (Bart Guingona), an encomendero of the kingdom charged with evangelizing the indigenous populations of the islands, operates with a mixture of freedom and brutality: having sex with local women who have already been converted, while forcing the men to build churches. In this case, they are working on one that has already been under construction for more than ten years.

In order to obtain more marble for the building, he sends a group of men, led by the somewhat rebellious and indifferent Dungwen (Christian Bables) —one of the many sons he is presumed to have— to retrieve it. It is a complicated mission because, on the one hand, transporting the material is far from easy, and on the other, the 50 kilometers of terrain they must cross are filled with criminals and thieves who will try to kill them and seize the marble. The most fearsome of them is a man named Baribari, who lies in wait for them and launches a surprise attack, plunging the already disorganized and exhausted delegation into absolute chaos.

At the same time, Father Enciso has also ordered them to capture an animist healer whose practices conflict with those of the Catholic Church, and some of the men are assigned to that task: keeping the healer (played by filmmaker Isabel Sandoval) locked up in a small jail. Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors divides its running time into two parts—the preparations for the mission and its execution—but in Diaz’s way of telling a story, neither is necessarily presented as such. The film is built around journeys, walks, conversations and offscreen attacks whose brutal consequences are all we are shown. Many of the story’s implications and connotations, meanwhile, lie not in the narrative itself but in researching its historical context.

Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors moves through the roads and landscapes familiar from Lav Diaz’s cinema, as do the circumstances surrounding its protagonists. It is a contemplative, unhurried film that gradually becomes more anguished, desperate and tense as the group charged with transporting the marble begins to come under mysterious attack in the middle of an impenetrable jungle. But beyond its small narrative jolts, the film connects with the filmmaker’s broader body of work, particularly his minimalist period pieces.

The film’s power comes fully into focus when viewed from a historical perspective. As Diaz points out, the Philippines continues to function as a colonized country, retaining many of the customs that were imposed by force —through weapons and the Church— at the time. The encomenderos and their principalías, the landowners with their haciendas and plantations, established the social and economic divisions that continue to exist there to this day. The same is true of the churches that were built at the time with the blood of thousands of Filipinos who died constructing them.