15 Oct 2025

Lav Diaz’s Closet Picks

The writer and director of Magellan praises the use of silence and space in Le samouraï, talks about how Mike Leigh and Kenji Mizoguchi explore the human condition in their films, and selects his good friend Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies.

Lav Diaz: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

12

8 single, 4 box sets

single films

8

chosen on their own

box sets

4

one choice, many films

films reached

67

the same visit, box sets opened

Criterion's own upload · on criterion.com

This visit as a strip, a cell for each choice: paler the older the film, indigo for a box set, which is one cell however many films it holds. The order is the order Criterion's own page lists them in, which is probably but not provably the order they came off the shelf.

1152 Lost Highway 1997 SET The Apu Trilogy 235 The Leopard 1963 306 Le samouraï 1967 SET Essential Fellini SET Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema 1214 I Am Cuba 1964 1215 Werckmeister Harmonies 2000 307 Naked 1993 701 Persona 1966 309 Ugetsu 1953 SET Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	Lost Highway	David Lynch	1997	6
2	The Apu Trilogy box set, 3 films			7
3	The Leopard	Luchino Visconti	1963	9
4	Le samouraï	Jean-Pierre Melville	1967	6
5	Essential Fellini box set, 14 films			16
6	Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema box set, 40 films			13
7	I Am Cuba	Mikhail Kalatozov	1964	3
8	Werckmeister Harmonies	Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky	2000	4
9	Naked	Mike Leigh	1993	14
10	Persona	Ingmar Bergman	1966	5
11	Ugetsu	Kenji Mizoguchi	1953	4
12	Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa box set, 3 films			1

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1953 to 2000, box sets 1946 to 2006

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Essential Fellini

Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa

The Apu Trilogy

a single film, at its year a box set, across the years of its films the collection, by decade

The axis is the same 1920 to 2030 on every visit page, so a haul that stayed inside one decade looks like one. A box set is drawn across the years of the films inside it, which is a range of release dates and not a claim about the set. Nothing here is in the order the choices were made: displayed position moves film year by a fifth of one percent of its variance, which is not a slope worth drawing.

How long this haul is

Its 67films run 124 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 619.9 minutes of film for each of its 12 choices, counting a box set as the one choice it was. Across the 375 visits with a complete total, the median is 136.4 minutes.

How unusual this haul was

Its 12 choices had been taken by 7.33 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa, taken by this visit alone.

This visit reached the work of Mike Leigh, through Naked, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com