The Woman who Left
(Ang babaeng humayo)

The film’s modest means are commensurate with the human scale of the stories told, the depictions of a people with no control over their destiny. Natural disasters, police violence, material insecurity and martial law impose an order of things that links past to present, the jungle of the cities to remote rural regions. In The Woman Who Left, the same lengthy timeline – thirty years precisely – is needed before Horacia, wrongly imprisoned for a crime she did not commit, completes her sentence. On her release, she seems inhabited by the sole desire for revenge. But in this melodrama, Lav Diaz, like Lino Brocka before him, portrays his characters in all their complexity and fragility, which again testifies to their humanity. JB