Batang West Side

A film by Lav Diaz
USA/Philippines 2001

The first major epic in the oeuvre of Lav Diaz (b. 1958) is a powerful contemporary portrait of the Filipino diaspora in New York and New Jersey: A Filipino-born detective investigates the murder of Hanzel Harana, a Filipino teenager, and must plod along with tenacity to break through the wall of silence surrounding the boy's death. The trail of the designer drug "shabu" runs through the film like a bloody trickle, but Diaz delegates the accounts of crime, domestic violence, and the discontent in the souls of his characters to the background for the most part, instead relying on the hypnotic portrait of a decaying life as a symbol of alienation from home. The more we learn about the protagonists, the more complex, intangible, and contradictory our image of them becomes.

Edition Filmmuseum 121
Double DVD
Language VO English/Tagalog Subtitles english | deutsch 
Length 289 min. Screen 1:1.85 - 16/9 (PAL) Sound DD 2.0 Age 16 Region code Alle Regionen
Bonus The Boy Who Choose the Earth (2018, 2 min.) | Booklet with texts by Lav Diaz and others