Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors

Still part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

LET US THROUGH, DEAR ANCESTORS   ***

Lav Diaz

2026

IDEA:  In 17th-century Philippines, an encomendero exploits his colonial subjects in his pursuit of building churches.

BLURB:  In Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors, the Philippine jungle is a rebellious thatch of muddy earth and vegetation criss-crossing in all directions, fragmented into fixed-perspective tableaux that deny contiguity. Askance camera angles and deep-focus wide shots tuck human figures into spaces that all but swallow them. The black-and-white lensing splinters the jungle even further, expressionistically abstracting the frame into a thousand shards of light and shadow. Diaz gives a theatricality to his images, as if staging ritual performances of the historical suffering of his ancestors so that the trauma may never be forgotten. (The addition of fake dirt spots across the frame compounds the sense of artifice.) This doesn't mean the images are airless museum displays, or that the people within them are as distant to the audience as they so often are to the camera. Let Us Through… offers intense emotional access to such characters as Dungwen (Christian Bables), whose Filipino-Spanish blood makes him privileged by the colonists and cursed to carry out their violence, and Himamat (Ronnie Lazaro), tirelessly indignant at the arrest of his sister on religious grounds. When Himamat’s sister, the pagan faith healer Babayeng Indimatandog (Isabel Sandoval), slowly looks up into the camera and flashes a sly grin while in prison, it’s a quiet but startling act of resistance. Let Us Through… doesn’t have the heft or poetry of its predecessor, Magellan, but it does share its righteous hatred of colonialism, and the hope to imagine what liberation from it could be like.