From What Is Before · reception & legacy
2014 · Lav Diaz
How From What Is Before has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
It premiered at Locarno 2014 and took the Golden Leopard — the moment the wider festival world stopped treating Lav Diaz as a fringe endurance test and started treating him as a major filmmaker. It's since settled in as one of the peaks of his filmography and of 2010s slow cinema.
What's debated
The perennial Diaz debate: is the five-and-a-half-hour runtime essential to the experience or a barrier that keeps a great film unseen — and is admitting you watched it in sittings cheating?
Its footprint
On Letterboxd it functions as a rite of passage — the film people log with a note about how long it took them, a badge of slow-cinema commitment more than a source of quotes or memes.
Where it stands
A 'you must have seen this' title within the slow-cinema faithful — canon for cinephiles who go deep, largely unknown outside them.