BATANG WEST SIDE

The first major epic in the oeuvre of Lav Diaz, long unavailable and newly restored in 4K, is a powerful contemporary portrait of the Filipino diaspora in New York and New Jersey: A Filipino-born detective investigates the murder of Hanzel Harana, a Filipino teenager, and must plod along with tenacity to break through the wall of silence surrounding the boy's death. The trail of the designer drug "shabu" runs through the film like a bloody trickle, but Diaz delegates the accounts of crime, domestic violence, and the discontent in the souls of his characters to the background for the most part, instead relying on the hypnotic portrait of a decaying life as a symbol of alienation from home. The more we learn about the protagonists, the more complex, intangible, and contradictory our image of them becomes.

"BATANG WEST SIDE is an examination of the Filipino consciousness. Why are the Philippines the way they are now? The Filipino people? Philippine cinema? Let’s not be contained and limited to convention and formula; we need to probe and probe, explode the wall of corruption. The perspective is ever historical, and ever advancing. Ultimately, the objective of BATANG WEST SIDE is simple — change. Whoever wishes to hinder this film is an enemy of change. Whoever is an enemy of change is an enemy of Philippine Cinema." - Lav Diaz