Norte, the End of History

Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment meets poetic realism: In his new masterpiece, celebrated in Cannes, Lav Diaz creates a moral portrait of the modern Philippines that leaves one speechless with its cinematic opulence and radical nihilism. The bourgeois law student Fabian has had enough of modern society and finally wants to put his revolutionary ideas into practice. His victim is the pawnbroker in his neighbourhood: he murders her, but the trail of the crime leads to Joaquin, a poor debtor of the murdered woman, who is made to confess without evidence and disappears for years in a high-security prison. Left behind is his wife and their two children, who must now master the daily struggle for survival alone. Lav Diaz weaves these briefly touched plot lines into a brilliant, allusive and exciting social novel in which the individual fates of the protagonists mirror a society damaged by centuries of colonialism and decades of dictatorship.