“I find it hard to understand my culture”. The entire oeuvre of Filipino director Lav Diaz is devoted to recovering the authentic history of his country after centuries of colonialism and an oppressive dictatorship. In Locarno in 2014, when he competed in the Concorso internazionale for the first time with From What Is Before, he discussed how, in turn, his culture determines the aesthetics of his work, with a different conception of time and space that derives from the cyclical and violent nature of an archipelago whose landscape is continuously destroyed, reshaped and regenerated.