Lullaby of Diasporic Time: On Lav Diaz’s A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery

Lav Diaz is an independent Filipino filmmaker notable as a key figure in the contemporary slow cinema movement. Of his oeuvre, one of the longest is A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (Filipino: Hele sa Higawang Hapis), a 2016 epic film that runs for 8 hours, orchestrating narratives derived from what are commonly sung as mythology and history. The movie was entered in the 66th Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Alfred Bauer Prize. This success has earned Diaz the spotlight in Filipino mainstream culture, albeit primarily garnering attention from the Filipino audience for the film’s runtime and international attention. The movement of the film, as a text, from the local toward the international and back home again, incurs in it a textuality that disrupts the phenomenology of time diasporically, scatteringly: that as much as its 8-hour languor “opens new perspective in the cinematic arts” according to the international rendition of this time, it is also the 8 hours whose value in the Philippine time is equivalent to that of a day’s labor, and thus the exoticization of its cinematic experience as a “challenge,” i.e., having to spend an entire working day of slow cinematography. This diaspora of time is of no cacophony; on the contrary, it is the lullaby, sorrowful and mysterious, that slows Diaz in to become a filmmaker attuned to the inter/national. Such orchestration is what sings toward a critique that is diasporic, not only in its locus of inquiry, but also by its very methodology.