Taxibol

The extraordinary opening sequence of this film depicts the encounter between one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, the Filipino director Lav Diaz, and a Cuban taxi driver, Gustavo Flecha. As they drive through the streets of San Antonio, the taxi serves not only as a form of transport through space but also through time. During the deeply personal and political dialogue between the two men, a question arises about an ex-collaborator of the dictator Marcos, now supposedly a refugee in Cuba. The decision to find him opens the film up to another formally exquisite, cinematographic dimension: through a meticulous and detailed observation of human behaviour, Tommaso Santambrogio manages to give an embodied account of power relationships, masterfully articulating the past with a present that seems frozen in time. The careful observation of relationships of subjugation in a hacienda in San Antonio, where all the employees are submitted to the law of their employer, creates evident echoes which allow us to draw links between the histories of injustice in the Philippines and Cuba.

Violeta Bava