Earlier this year, Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz had a near-death experience, and not for the first time.
He was editing his new film, Magellan, when he began vomiting blood. “I almost died from tuberculosis. I vomited blood four times. It was scary,” he says.
When we met for this interview, the 66-year-old was sitting in a hotel in Doha, Qatar. “This is the first time that I’ve got out of the Philippines [since then],” he explains. “I’m still on medication.”
He seems entirely calm, but then he is no stranger to death.
Right from the start, I knew that there was going to be a lot of rejection of my kind of cinema.
Born in Columbio, Mindanao, Diaz grew up in a world where you would need to walk miles to see a doctor, where everything from crocodiles to the common cold could kill.
He almost died “at the age of four, the age of eight, and … in 2004 as well, I almost died of cancer. I still have the scars.”