Filipino director Lav Diaz is in post-production on An Entry Into the Sadness of a Portuguese Woman, the closing chapter of his Hermes Trilogy, and he took the project to the Venice Gap-Financing Market, which ran from Sept. 4 to 6. The news, reported by Variety, lands the same week Diaz returns to the Lido with Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors (Makikiraan Po), selected for Venice Open.
What the film is
The drama is set in Lisbon and follows Lieutenant Ines Horta, described in the project materials as one of the city’s finest detectives, as she works a case alongside Sergeant Mariana Moura. Horta waits on information from Filipino Lieutenant Hermes Papauran that never comes, and hands the case to Mariana, a decision that puts her colleague in danger.
It continues the arc of When the Waves Are Gone (2020) and Essential Truths of the Lake (2023), both of which premiered at Locarno and centred on Papauran, played by John Lloyd Cruz. Cruz returns here alongside Monica Calle and Ana Vilela Da Costa. Diaz writes and directs.
Diaz told Variety that although the focus shifts to Horta, “the spirit of Lt. Hermes Papauran is still very present in it,” calling both investigators “deeply conflicted beings, restless and battered souls” who distrust the orthodoxies of the system they work inside.
The money map
For anyone tracking how auteur cinema actually gets funded, the credit block is the story. The film is produced by Jean-Christophe Simon for Films Boutique, co-produced by Epic Media and Rosa Filmes, and supported by ARTE, Bord Cadre and Sovereign Films.
- A sales-house-led producer: Films Boutique is best known as an international sales company, which means distribution logic is baked in from the start rather than bolted on after a festival premiere.
- Two territory anchors: Epic Media on the Philippine side and Rosa Filmes in Portugal, matching the film’s dual-nation story to two production bases and two sets of local incentives.
- Broadcaster and soft money: ARTE brings European public-broadcaster backing, the kind of pre-sale that has underwritten festival cinema for decades.
- A gap market appearance: Presenting at Venice’s Gap-Financing Market signals a remaining hole in the budget, typically closed with equity, a late pre-sale or additional co-production coin during post.
Why this matters beyond the arthouse
Streaming buyers spent the last five years chasing scale, then spent the last two chasing margin. What has not changed is the value of a filmmaker with a fixed, identifiable audience across multiple territories. Diaz won the Golden Lion for The Woman Who Left a decade ago and premiered Magellan, with Gael Garc\u00eda Bernal, at Cannes last year. That track record is what makes a multi-country financing stack assemble at all.
The practical lesson for producers and acquisitions teams in India and elsewhere: the gap-financing market is a functioning liquidity layer for films that already have credible partners attached. It is not a place to sell an idea. It is a place to close the last slice on a project with a director, a cast, a sales agent and a broadcaster already locked. Indian producers building international co-productions should read the Diaz template closely, because it shows how a story split between two countries can be financed by institutions in both.
The pipeline signal
Two Diaz features moving through the system in the same year, one premiering and one in post, tells you the European festival-financing circuit is still funding long-form, slow-cinema work at a steady clip. For programmers, sales agents and platform buyers who acquire festival titles for library depth, that pipeline is worth watching. Diaz described the visionary filmmaker as someone obsessed with responsibility and seeking “only the truth” \u2014 a pitch that will not move a subscriber dashboard on its own, but which reliably moves festival juries, and festival juries still move acquisition prices.
Source: Variety
