Duration is the result of a process of transformation, of evolution. The 10 and a half hours of this true giant of the seventh art show precisely this, the transformation of a family during the more than ten years of martial law imposed by the dictator Marcos between the 70s and 80s. The evolution (or, perhaps, involution?) of a family that acts as a synecdoche for the entire native country of Lav Diaz. The social aspect is the fundamental one, as in much of Diaz's production, here even more marked by the use of journalistic footage of the city guerrillas and Marcos' proclamations. The reality that penetrates cinematic fiction, the cinema that becomes a little more real, also thanks to an almost documentary-like staging, at times indebted to the first Béla Tarr, that of Nido Famigliare and Rapporti Prefabbricati, for example. Opposite of some technical limitations, also dictated by financing problems, and directorial errors, such as crossing over of fields, the stylistic experimentation carried out by Diaz, which is indeed still in an imperfect state, still presents a certain attachment to the specific and exclusive language of cinema, as the use of editing, traditional decoupage (many but not very many actual sequence shots, while internal cuts to the same scene are often found) and camera movements, exclusively by hand. However, the spirit of the film and of the artist-Diaz is already well defined, it is the same that will permeate his true masterpieces such as Florentina Hubaldo, CTE and Melancholia. The desperation of the protagonists, always microcosmic representations of the macrocosm of the Philippine country, is not a flow that, as often happens in traditional cinema, comes out of the film to hit the spectator but is a subcutaneous virus that moves within the film itself and which it incorporates the public, never proving to be a narrative "tool" but, rather, the real dimension within which the protagonists move. In this lies the great power of Diaz's cinema, in the ruthless desperation which is never a mere trick to excite the spectator but the true hopeless, anguished and sobbing cry of a Country brought to its knees by its own History, by its own Power.