Director Sticks Up For Eight-Hour Movie That Needs Its Own Lunch Break

Some movies just feel long, but there’s one showing at the Berlin Film Festival this week which is so long it needs its own lunch break.

‘Hele Sa Hiwagang Hapis (A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery)’ has been made by Fillipino director Lav Diaz, and it’s more than eight-hours long.

When the Festival showed it earlier this week, as part of its Golden Bear prize competition, it began at 9.30am, and ended just before 7pm, with an hour-long break for lunch.

The movie is a historical drama, but Diaz has denied that it’s over-long.

“We’re labeled ‘the slow cinema’ but it’s not slow cinema, it’s cinema,” he told Reuters.

“I don’t know why… every time we discourse on cinema we always focus on the length.

“It’s cinema, it’s just like poetry, just like music, just like painting where it’s free, whether it’s a small canvas or it’s a big canvas, it’s the same… So cinema shouldn’t be imposed on.”

The film’s producer Bianca Balbuena also went on to thank the Festival organisers for not making them abridge the movie.

“The Berlinale gave us the freedom, they didn’t ask us to cut down the length of the film,” she said.

“Thank you, Berlin.”

The film is set in the late 19th century during the Filipino revolution against occupying Spain, centring on Andres Bonifacio y de Castro, who was key to the uprising.

It is, of course, some way from the longest movie ever made.

That dubious accolade goes to 'Logisitics’, a 'road movie’ made by Swedish artists Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson, which runs for 37 full days (that’s 51420 minutes).

It was screened in Stockholm in 2012, running into 2013.

Prior to that, 'Modern Times Forever’, made by the Danish art collective Superflex in 2011, was the record holder, which hit 240 hours.

Image credits: AFP/AP