‘Makikiraan Po (Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors)’ Review: Lav Diaz and Isabel Sandoval Team Up for a Mournful, Modest Anti-Colonial Drama

‘Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors’ Review: Lav Diaz Delivers an Immaculate, Slow-Burn Period Drama of Rare and Restless Insight

Set almost a century after Magellan first landed on the Philippine Archipelago, and coming just a year after “Magellan,” director Lav Diaz’s last film, landed in Cannes, “Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors” is a description of bruised history rendered in the sharp, precise, scarring lines of a newly inked tattoo. In many ways a companion piece to “Magellan”‘s epic, full-color demythologization of the Portuguese explorer’s legacy, but in others a con…

‘Makikiraan Po (Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors)’ Review: Lav Diaz and Isabel Sandoval Team Up for a Mournful, Modest Anti-Colonial Drama

Clocking in at a mere 151 minutes, Lav Diaz’s latest opus “Makikiraan Po (Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors)” is his shortest feature in 24 years — no sweat for hardcore fans of the Filipino auteur’s durational cinema. It’s likely to interest his eager detractors, given its relative digestibility. More modestly scaled than last year’s “Magellan,” Diaz’s swift return to his signature noirish image-making is, like his last film, a story of colonial c…

"LET US THROUGH, DEAR ANCESTORS"

THE STORY – 1617. The Spanish friar, Padre Enciso, the encomendero of one of the islands in Las Islas Filipinas, rules with unrelenting toughness and insatiable libido, “To tame these savages,” he proclaims. He salves his cruelty effectively by invoking the soul’s emancipation through Jesus’ suffering; and the hospitable and embracing indigenous Malay is doomed. […]

Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors (Makikiraan Po)

QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM VENICE Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz returns to one of the central themes of his cinema: the long and devastating afterlife of colonialism. Set in the Philippines in 1617, the film examines the violence of Spanish rule [OVO...]

Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors — Lav Diaz [Venice '26 Review]

In 2025, among the best films of the year, at least according this very outlet, was Lav Diaz’s Magellan. That work concluded along the waters of Cebu in 1521 AD, with the historical figure Enrique de Malaca — a Filipino enslaved to the titular Spanish-employed figure and circumnavigator — narrating his tacit betrayal of the [...]