Horacia (Charo Santos-Concio), a former primary school teacher, has spent thirty years in a women’s prison for a crime she did not commit. When an inmate confesses the crime, Horacia is released and sets off to look for her son, Junior, who has disappeared. During her search, the woman discovers the changes that have taken place in her country. It is the 1990s and the widespread corruption and constant kidnappings are terrorizing the population. In 2016 Lav Diaz took The Woman Who Left, a stunning and immense film which tells of the painful journey of an innocent woman, driven by ideals of solidarity and compassion who ends up having to reckon with an unexpected desire for vendetta, to the Venice Film Festival. The starting point for the film, for which the Filipino director was awarded the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award, was the story by Leo Tolstoy, God Sees the Truth, but waits, which once again lets Diaz reflect on the recurrent themes of his films: good and evil, crime and punishment. The result is an impressive film which abandons the contemplative and ecstatic voice of his previous films to approach the styles of the noir and which shows, once again, Lav Diaz’s need for a political and militant cinema