While not exactly a full-fledged magnum opus, From What Is Before hints at a new direction combining an unhurried visual pace and a more dramatic, forceful approach in tackling history and politics.

[A] hauntingly beautiful new picture, which chronicles the gradual decline of a small coastal barrio in the Philippines in the final days before president Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law in 1972.

Diaz's prolonged approach to storytelling is a tough sit with no easy payoff, but it enables him to cast a remarkable spell defined by a recurring sense of dislocation.

What Diaz has done is to distill centuries of the country's sorrows and agonies into a fascinatingly fractured narrative that will never ever leave you.