When she was in the Berlinale last year with In the Navel of the Sea, Marilou Diaz-Abaya was already deep in preparations for her three-hour epic on the life and struggles of the Philippines' national hero, made to mark the 1998 centenary of the country's independence from Spanish colonial rule. Distilling everything from Rizal's academic achievements to his literary agitation against both the colonial civil service and the functionaries of the Catholic church inevitably involved much compression.

Diaz-Abaya, reluctant to deliver a standard history lesson, has her Rizal (played with great dignity by Cesar Montano) thinking back over episodes from his life and writings from the prison cell in which he awaits the firing squad. The result is an elegant and stirring film. Tony Rayns