Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz has won the Brian Award at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival for “Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors” (“Makikiraan Po”), a collateral prize given to the film that best embodies the festival’s spirit of rationalism, human rights, and pluralism.

The Brian Award, known in Italian as Premio Brian, has been presented since 2006 by the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics (UAAR), a secularist advocacy group affiliated with the global network Humanists International. Named for the Monty Python film “Life of Brian,” the prize goes to whichever film screened at Venice that year most strongly advances values the UAAR champions: rationality, freedom of conscience, and equal treatment regardless of sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or religious belief.

“Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors” is set in 1617, during the height of Spain’s colonization of the Philippines. Bart Guingona plays Padre Enciso, a Spanish friar overseeing the construction of a church who sends his son, Dungwen — played by Christian Bables — to move limestone through territory where native communities are still resisting colonial rule. The cast also includes Ronnie Lazaro, Isabel Sandoval, Yul Servo, Hazel Orencio, and Rafa Siguion-Reyna. Diaz has described the film’s central image, the colonial-era church, as one of the clearest physical records of what colonization cost the people forced to build it.

The film was produced by producers Bianca Balbuena and Montgomery Blencowe, and executive produced by actress Lovi Poe through her production company, C’est Lovi Productions, in partnership with Epicmedia Productions and Diaz’s own production house, Sine Olivia Pilipinas. It premiered out of competition in the festival’s Venice Open section, a lineup this year that also included new films from directors Paul Schrader and Gianni Amelio. Greek sales agency Heretic picked up international rights to the film in August, ahead of its Venice debut.

The Brian Award is Diaz’s first Venice trophy since 2016, when he won the festival’s top honor, the Golden Lion, for “The Woman Who Left” (“Ang Babaeng Humayo”) — becoming the first Filipino filmmaker to take Venice’s highest prize. He remains one of the festival’s most frequent Filipino presences, with a run of selections stretching back to 2007’s “Death in the Land of Encantos,” and has separately won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland and the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Actress Liza Soberano was also in Venice this year, serving on the jury for the Golden Globes Impact Prize for Documentary, presented by the Artemis Rising Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that has partnered with the Golden Globes since 2025 to spotlight social-issue documentaries — a jury seat ElysPlanet covered in detail last month. It was her first Venice Film Festival.

The 83rd Venice International Film Festival runs through September 12, when the Golden Lion and the rest of the main competition winners will be announced.