Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors: Lav Diaz explores the horrors inflicted upon the Philippine islands in a smart historical epic

• Reviewed from the 2026 Venice Film Festival

Filipino auteur Lav Diaz has devoted much of his career to examining specific historic periods in his country’s history. His latest, Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors, is set in 1617, when the Spanish missionaries were building their churches and converting the native population by force. As Diaz unambiguously portrays it, this was nothing short of a brutal and violent form of colonisation, using Christianity merely as a guise for the dominance and enslavement, sexual and otherwise, of the local populace.  

In a dense jungle commune, a Spanish priest, Father Enciso (Bart Guingona) has spent the past decades overseeing the forcible conversion of the native populace and the ongoing construction of a church, a formidable task in a land devoid of the mineral resources needed to erect the sort of monumental facade that the priest insists upon. Nearly all of the men have died in efforts to transport marble for the purpose, and Father Encisco, hypocritically defying the sanctity he imposes on others, has taken advantage by sleeping with several of the women, fathering a number of children in the commune. Among them is Dungwen (Christian Bables), who has rejected his Spanish father in order to live among the natives, many of whom try to keep their own spiritual practice of ancestor worship alive in defiance of the colonial power’s imposition. 

Enciso tasks his son on the dangerous mission of importing a shipment of marble through trecherous jungle territory – in addition to its geographical dangers, it is also inhabited by the murderous gang of bandits led by Bari-Bari (Yul Servo) – promising him riches and a vast estate should he succeed, gifts that he vows to pass on to Dungwen’s wife and children in the likely event that he perishes during the mission. Meanwhile, a spiritual civil war is carried out against the natives via the imprisonment of traditional healer Babayeng Indimatandog (played by director Isabel Sandoval); to her guards, one elder offers a virulent warning: “Fear the curse that will come from our ancestors!” 

Diaz is among the few auteurs today who could be said to work chiefly in the epic form, using history as a source for building myth-like narrative in an elevated style, such as we find in ancient colossal sagas, heroicising the long-forgotten victims of this tragic history. Shooting in atmospheric black-and-white and favouring wide angles that make the landscape a virtual co-star of the film, Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors lays bare the ravages inflicted on the Philippine islands by a force that had nothing but disdain for its local populace, whom it viewed as “savages,” and nothing but ignorant contempt for their form of civilisation and culture, whose spirituality was all the richer for its understanding of and reverence for the natural world.