⚝ Intercepted At February 01, 2026
Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012)
Lav Diaz • 🇵ðŸ‡
Philippine New Wave, Psychological Drama
Uncomfortable scenarios are the bread and butter of Lav Diaz's filmography; Melancholia has strange takes on PTSD therapies, Norte: The End of History is a loose adaptation of Crime & Punishment, The Halt is a strikingly eerie story on oligarchy x calamity, Heremias has a 1.5 hour POV longtake (it's one of the boldest things I ever experienced in cinema, surely in my top 5 long takes ever). Cinema, in its most basic sense, started as the sculpting of light over continual imagestream. Then it was found out how cinema is different from every other artistic media. If one is working with text, they must mitigate the lack of immediate sensory details with the evocation of them via text; there's a tradeoff where the audience has to rely on imagination to create the text in their head. On the other hand, a musician cannot omit sensory details with the total favour for inducing the audience's dasein evocation, unless it's John Cage's 4'33; and here, the audience is reacting to the immediate sensory perception of hearing, even in very low-key music, there's an immediate sensory wiring between the source and the listener. And so on and so forth. But cinema is the closest to what humans immediately perceive. And atop that, it can mimic the unique evocative powers of other arts and aggregate them. A sculptor feels the sculpture in his imagination, works with tactile material and creates a very concrete final product. The work's appreciator stands in front of it, reacts with primary senses of sight and touch. Then someone takes a photograph of it, hence transforming the live sculpture to a still, a still which might evoke entirely different reactions based on the angle and the processing. Then someone could take a video of it, doing two possible things unique from both seeing the sculpture live and seeing a photograph of it; firstly, now the audience experience to seeing the video is equivalent to seeing the sculpture in real time, but without actually being in context of the sculpture's surroundings. Secondly, as the photograph could interpret the sculpture differently depending on angle/processing, the video can do the same and then transcend the stillness. Now, if someone attached music to it, then the sculpture could again take further leads towards a myriad of different possible evocations. Moreover, if someone links a text with the video in real time, the video, by then, has the immediate abstract sensory response (from sound), immediate visual sensory response (from visuals), the imagination-incentive (from text) and the imagination-cum-physical details (from sculpture). Thus, as Andrei Tarkovsky said, cinema is sculpting in time.
Perhaps then, slow cinema is the purest form of cinema as sculptures of being-there-then. A blockbuster relies on mass appeal to use time for entertainment. An abstract film, something by Stan Brakhage for example, would be, on the contrary, finding imagination on the factual. Slow cinema is simply "it is what it is". Maybe "it is what it is" takes the grandest form in Florentina Hubaldo than anything possible with other forms of cinema, notwithstanding its treatment as either art or entertainment. Even in Lav Diaz's enviable catalogue of dark masterpieces, Florentina Hubaldo stands out for the sheer disturbing factor. There's no gore here, nor any catastrophic event that changes the course of humanity, but it's far darker than Cannibal Holocaust or Men Behind the Sun could ever be. My thoughts on this film could span exhaustive paragraphs and we can't fit that here so I will just stick to a particular aspect that I found to be highly unique even in Diaz's filmography.
Throughout the whole runtime, there are some apparently disconnected vignettes of the titular character in catatonic states amidst mundane urbanity. Exactly the scene that's on the poster. The angle would remain fixed in one iteration, then become slightly wavering in another, and sometimes the framing itself would change. There's a deeply eerie quality to how they appear in the course of the film and to add further to that, the audio is heavily modified to omit major details and focus on abstracted respiratory sounds in ultra lowkey environmental sounds. Again, I have to avoid a discourse on that one but I can say, it is one of the most effective use of disconnected vignettes I have ever seen in the history of cinema. This cinematic device is reflective of the condition in the title, CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy).
Since it is a Diaz film, comments on actors' performance would always be in the affirmative and the superlative. But if I had to pick the single greatest acting performance in a Diaz film, it would surely be Hazel Orencio as Florentina Hubaldo. You do not see her as an actor relying on the audience, or even the director; but the character and only the character. Lav Diaz has created a sculpture of Florentina Hubaldo and the audience sees this sculpture in time, becoming one with the trauma for six hours.
Footnotes:
• Written on 17 Dec 2025