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Jury also includes Bahman Ghobadi, Agnès Godard, Lav Diaz and Jang Sun-woo.

Award-winning Us filmmaker Oliver Stone is set to head the 22nd Busan International Film Festival (Biff)’s jury for New Currents, the competition section for up-and-coming Asian directors.

The winner of Oscars, Golden Globes and a Berlinale Silver Bear for directing films such as Platoon and Born On The Fourth of July, Stone was recently at the Sarajevo film festival to receive an honorary award and screen a showcase including his latest documentary, The Putin Interviews.

Speaking with Screen there, he expressed concerns about the Us stance on North Korea and the possibility of doing a project focused on the hermetic country.

Stone will be joined on the Biff jury by Kurdish-Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, whose films include Cannes Camera d’or winner A Time For Drunken Horses and No One Knows About Persian Cats, which won the Cannes Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize...

Mubi is proud to present the first-ever online retrospective of renowned Filipino auteur Lav Diaz. To give audiences the proper time to spend immersed in Diaz’s cinema, Mubi will debut one film each month during the retrospective.Illustration by Leah BravoFilmmaker Lavrente Indico Diaz, named after Soviet statesman Lavrentiy Beria (1899-1953), was born on December 30th 1958 in the municipality of Datu Paglas, province of Maguindanao, Mindanao Island, Southern Philippines. The son of a fervently Catholic woman from the Visayas (Central Philippines) and a Socialist intellectual from Ilocos (Northern Philippines) who, firmly believing that education is the key to improve Man's condition, devoted their lives to schooling peasants in the poorest, remotest Maguindanao villages, Diaz has always had an utilitarian conception of culture and, by extension, of all forms of artistic expression. To Diaz, art should not be an end to itself, a purely formalist exercise, but—to paraphrase a...

Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis

Director: Lav Diaz // Writer: Lav Diaz

The most notable auteur out of the Philippines in the last decade is Lav Diaz, whose beautiful films often test audience stamina (his 2008 film Melancholia is seven and a half hours, while 2011’s Century of Birthing is six). Recently, he’s enjoyed a higher profile thanks to 2013’s Norte, or the End of History premiering in Un Certain Regard at Cannes (and snagging Us distribution), and then winning Locarno’s Golden Leopard a year later with From What is Before. He’s recently completed his latest, Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis, a film simply described as concerning the search for the body of Andres Bonifacio (a man known as the Father of the Philippine Revoluton).

Cast: John Lloyd Cruz, Piolo Pascual, Hazel Orencio, Alessandra de Rossi

Production Co./Producers: Bianca Balbuena, Epicmedia, TEN17P, Sine Olivia

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available.

New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center is launching Time Regained: The Films of Lav Diaz, the most complete American retrospective yet with a week-long run for Norte, the End of History (2013) and, on Sunday, a screening of Melancholia (2008). We gather new perspectives on the cinema of Lav Diaz from Artforum, Film Comment, the New York Times and more. » - David Hudson...

New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center has revealed its upcoming summer lineup of films that will screen through August. The slate includes Bong Joon-ho's long-awaited "Snowpiercer," Lukas Moodysson's festival hit "We Are the Best!," Steve James' Roger Ebert documentary "Life Itself," and Gia Coppola's buzzed-about directorial debut "Palo Alto," which just screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. Read More: Here Are the Best Things Said by Meg Ryan, Billy Crystal and More at Rob Reiner's Chaplin Award Gala In conjunction with the exclusive opening of "Norte, the End of History," the Film Society will also play host to "Time Regained: The Films of Lav Diaz," a retrospective of the filmmaker, beginning June 22 with "Melancholia" (2008) and continuing with one film a month from August through February 2015. In August, Joaquim Pinto’s winner of the jury prize at last year’s Locarno Film Festival, "What Now? Remind Me,...

Exclusive: UK distributor acquires rights to Lav Diaz’s Un Certain Regard entry.

UK distributor New Wave Films has acquired Lav Diaz’s epic drama Norte, the End of History.

The festival favourite, which debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes and has also played at Karlovy Vary, Locarno and Toronto among other festivals, begins as a riff on Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment but also alludes to Philippino class and politics, the country’s intelligentsia and its foreign-worker phenomenon.

New Wave, which acquired the film from producer is Raymond Lee after its screening at the London Film Festival, plans a spring 2014 release.

Cinema Guild had already acquired Us rights.

Screenplay is from Lav Diaz and Rody Vera. Cast includes Sid Lucero, Angeli Bayani, Archie Alemania, Angelina Kanapi and Soliman Cruz.

Philippine New Wave director Diaz won Venice’s Orrizonti Award in 2008 for drama Melancholia.

Norte, the End of History – Lav Diaz

Section: Un Certain Regard

Buzz: Buzz: Lav Diaz can get ghetto-ized as that Filipino director who makes obscenely long films (which, his films really are often way too long), but he’s also one of the best Asian filmmakers working today (his eight-hour Melancholia is a flat-out masterpiece). Strikingly prolific considering the length of his films, the Twitterverse was quick to tease his latest – <em>only</em> four hours and ten minutes long – as a misplaced submission to the festival’s Short Film Corner. Alas, Diaz is one of the most avant-garde and sui generis directors in this year’s event, so this should be a refreshing break from the (relatively) straight-forward routes of 98% of the rest of the pack…for those with butts brave enough to give it a shot.

The Gist:<em>A man is wrongly jailed for murder while the real killer roams free.