“Let Us Through Dear Ancestors”, interview with director Lav Diaz and producer Monty Blencowe

Selected in the Open section of the Venice Film Festival 2026, Let Us Through Dear Ancestors is set in 1617, when the Spanish friar Padre Enciso, encomendero of one of the islands in Las Islas Filipinas, rules with unrelenting toughness and insatiable libido, proclaiming his mission “to tame these savages.” Director Lav Diaz and producer Monty Blencowe talk about the forgotten history behind the film, its philosophy of slow cinema, and the story of how the film nearly didn’t get made.

Educating About a Forgotten Colonization

For Diaz, the film exists above all to educate. “It’s all education. I just want to educate our people about what happened during that era, that period, because what’s happening in the present, you have to examine the past.”

The history he wants to bring back, he explains, has largely been erased: “That period was really forgotten now. They didn’t even know that it happened. So it will be a shock to them to realize that colonization is not just officially from imperial Spain, but it’s also the Catholic Church. It was a power then, everything, the word of the friars. So we should go back to that and discourse on it, so that we can understand what’s happening in our culture, understand the present.”

Connection Over Manipulation

Diaz’s filmmaking style, deliberately slow and demanding, is a direct response to how he sees commercial cinema working on audiences. “For me it’s connection. I need to have a good, some kind of a real connection with the audience, not just imposing and manipulating them with their emotions. The way we do it in commercial movies, it’s all manipulated: the sound, the fast cuts. For me, we should take a break. Let’s look at life. Let’s discourse on it. Let’s go deeper in life. Be dialectical about life.”

Asked whether audiences might eventually push back against the pace of modern screen culture, Diaz doesn’t hesitate: “Everything is fast now, but we’ll try. There’s a need to just breathe, and let’s do something about it, because everything is fast, and the wall of ignorance, the wall of lies, the wall of violence, all these tyrannies that are debuckling culture, is here. So we need to fight it with the truth. We need to fight it with just sitting down. Let’s look at life more, other than just looking at little cell phones, little computers, and we don’t see the world anymore. Let’s go back to poetry, let’s go back to music, let’s go back to philosophy, let’s make love better.”

Monty Saved the Film

Producing a Lav Diaz film, says Blencowe, has been easier than expected, even if Diaz’s ideas keep evolving along the way: “Honestly, it wasn’t challenging from my end. Lav and Hazel, they run a great production, so I’m very grateful for making it easy. I will say that Lav can change the ideas of what he wants to do, so that’s a little different, but hey, look what he produces: all these amazing films, so it works.”

Financing an independent film like this one, he explains, relies on a particular kind of backer: “It’s different from the typical commercial films. You go about it with people who are interested in supporting a Lav Diaz film, people that want to tell history. I think that’s a different type of investor, but they are out there, and I was lucky enough that I knew a bunch of people that are big fans of Lav, and we could put it together.”

That support, it turns out, arrived just in time. “Monty saved the film,” says Diaz. “The original producers, they backed out, except for one. We were in LA, he was driving his car, we went for breakfast, and I told him: ‘We have a problem in the production.’ I said, ‘How much more do you need?’ But, okay, I’m in. That’s it. We finished the film.”

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