A tattoo, a masterclass that reshaped fifteen filmmakers from fifteen countries, and the two weeks in Bologna that sent Lav Diaz home to New York with both.
Lav Diaz returned to New York carrying fresh ink and, with it, evidence of two weeks in Bologna that had drifted well past the bounds of a conventional masterclass – an experience built on a kind of time this city rarely affords anyone, least of all a filmmaker.
He landed at JFK in that soft 8:30 p.m. summer light that turns the runways the color of bronze as the plane pulls away from the gate. I picked him up where I always do, at the departures level – a habit born of necessity, since Diaz doesn’t carry a phone. We time it off the plane’s actual arrival, add roughly an hour for him to clear the terminal, and if he isn’t out by then, I loop the departures road every half hour until he is. That night, the timing held. We went straight from the airport to a Chinese takeout near his place – three square tables, the hum of a walk-in refrigerator, fluorescent light flickering overhead. I’d come expecting stories from Bologna. The tattoo was the last thing I expected to see.
On his inner left forearm, the ink was still settling – MF CINE, rendered in a spare, sans-serif block, dark enough that it looked almost improvised, as though someone had scrawled it on with a marker and forgotten to wash it off. It wasn’t. It was permanent, the residue of two weeks in northern Italy in which instruction had dissolved into something closer to total immersion.
In late June and early July, Diaz – among contemporary cinema’s most uncompromising auteurs, a filmmaker who has built an entire aesthetic around the refusal to compromise on duration – served as master teacher for the 13th edition of the International Filmmaking Academy’s masterclass in Bologna, staged in partnership with the Cineteca di Bologna and IFA’s president, Marija Krunic. The academy drew emerging filmmakers, cinematographers, and assistant directors from around the world to spend June 25 through July 7 developing, shooting, and premiering short films under his guidance.
The academy was founded in Bologna in 2012 by Gian Vittorio Baldi, the Bolognese producer and director whose credits intersect with the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Robert Bresson, and who died in 2015. Krunic, his collaborator through the academy’s first twelve years and now its president, puts the premise simply: place emerging filmmakers ‘under the guidance of some of the great auteurs of our time.’ The experience, she said, ‘is meant to be transformative: to challenge and inspire them, deepening their understanding of filmmaking.’ Diaz now joins a roster of past master teachers that includes Bernardo Bertolucci, Abbas Kiarostami, Béla Tarr, Jane Campion, Cristian Mungiu, Andrey Zvyagintsev, and Asghar Farhadi, under honorary president Ruben Östlund. What she wants most is simpler than any curriculum: for filmmakers to leave Bologna ‘having learned not only from Lav Diaz, but also having gained greater confidence and a stronger sense of their own voice.’
For upward of nine hours a day, Diaz guided a cohort of 15 filmmakers drawn from 15 countries – New Zealand, Mexico, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Australia, the United Kingdom, Honduras, Canada, Finland, the United States, Brazil, Italy, Japan, and Switzerland – through an entire creative cycle: writing, location scouting, shooting, editing, and, finally, screening new work at the Cineteca. Lynne Ramsay had originally been announced, for the first time in the academy’s history, as a co-master teacher leading a parallel cohort. According to Diaz, the collaboration did not materialize, and by the time the masterclass was underway, he was working with the full group alone. The ambition was never simply technical. It was to alter how these filmmakers thought about cinema itself.
Which raises an obvious question: why Bologna, and not the city where Diaz first learned his own craft – and where, weeks later, I found myself staring at his forearm over a plate of takeout?
The masterclass unfolded in a city unusually organized around the act of paying attention. The Cineteca di Bologna, one of Europe’s foremost film archives, functions as both preservation hub and civic institution – restoring prints, operating theaters, and, for a few weeks each summer, converting its piazzas into open-air cinemas. Its signature festival, Il Cinema Ritrovato – a true cinephile paradise and one of the most important festivals in the world for restored and classic cinema – filled Piazza Maggiore this year with restorations and classics for its 40th edition. Krunic put the count at 504 films and more than 200,000 cinema lovers. ‘What surrounds us shapes what we are able to imagine,’ she told me. ‘When you place yourself in an environment filled with cinema, ideas, and people who are passionate about it, inspiration becomes part of your everyday experience rather than something you have to search for.’
This year, the masterclass ran concurrently with that festival. On July 3, as thousands gathered under the stars in Piazza Maggiore for a screening of Diaz’s Magellan – introduced by Diaz himself – his film When the Waves Are Gone screened the same evening at Cinema Modernissimo. By day, participants wrote scripts, scouted locations beneath Bologna’s porticoes, and filmed under the direction of a filmmaker whose own work routinely runs six or eight hours. At just over three hours, When the Waves Are Gone is comparatively restrained by Diaz’s standards, though no less uncompromising in its moral architecture. Widely described by critics as a loose descendant of The Count of Monte Cristo – though Diaz himself has said Dumas wasn’t a conscious influence – the film reworks a revenge narrative between two policemen into a meditation on institutional decay and national decline, set against Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drug campaign.
The pairing of those two screenings with the masterclass was, Krunic said, deliberate. She wanted the participants to encounter Diaz’s cinema not only in the classroom, but through the collective experience of seeing his films on the big screen, surrounded by an audience. Magellan, she noted, confronts history – colonialism, power, memory, and the question of who has the right to tell the story of the past – while When the Waves Are Gone turns that gaze inward, onto the wounds history leaves in individuals and societies, and the difficulty of escaping what has been done. Watching those films while working alongside Diaz in the classroom and on set, she said, ‘created a continuity between the filmmaker, his work, and his way of seeing.’ Her students, she added, ‘were not simply studying the work of a great filmmaker; they were living in conversation with it. They leave Bologna not with a formula to imitate, but with a greater freedom to find their own identity.’
Bologna itself offered a lesson well beyond the classroom. ‘Bologna is also an essential part of that experience: a medieval city of ancient knowledge, artistic fervor, and rebellious spirits,’ Krunic said. ‘It is home to the oldest university in the Western world, founded in 1088 – a place where knowledge has been passed down for nearly a thousand years.’ Civic rhythms did the rest: audiences conditioned to sit through long films, a cultural infrastructure built to sustain them, public funding willing to underwrite festivals of this scale. For a group of aspiring filmmakers, it was easy to forget, until Bologna made it obvious: cinema is never sustained by artists alone. It depends on institutions, audiences, and civic commitments willing to underwrite ambition.
The program itself was designed to compress, not extend. Applications were open internationally; tuition covered housing, festival access, and the promise of premiering a short at the Cineteca before the two weeks were out. Under Diaz’s supervision, the 15 filmmakers – working across crews of directors, cinematographers, and assistant directors – produced ten short films by the program’s end.
Krunic describes the compressed format as something the academy engineers on purpose. Before arriving in Bologna, participants are asked to bring an idea ‘in harmony with their essence’; the academy supplies locations, actors, and local production support, and the clock does the rest. ‘Limitation becomes freedom,’ she said. Without endless preparation, equipment, or options, they have to listen more deeply, make decisions, trust their instincts, and find solutions with what is in front of them. She calls the process ‘almost maieutic’ – less instruction than the creation of conditions for something already present to surface. There is no time to remain in the abstract or wait for everything to be perfect, and something powerful happens, she said, in discovering you are capable of more than you thought. A longer course might afford more room for reflection and technical polish. This one puts filmmakers in ‘direct contact with yourself.’ ‘You discover very quickly how you respond to uncertainty, how you communicate under pressure, what you are willing to let go of, and what you are truly capable of creating when you trust yourself,’ she said. ‘In a way, the two weeks become a journey of self-discovery.’ The film is merely the visible result. The deeper achievement is often the transformation inside the person making it.
Immersion, as she describes it, means filmmaking becomes the environment you live in for those two weeks. Participants are not attending Diaz’s classes and then returning to ordinary life. They live together, work together, watch films together, and move through Bologna together. The boundaries between classroom, set, cinema, and conversation dissolve – someone might watch a restored classic in the afternoon and find themselves discussing it on set that evening, or over dinner. ‘For two intense weeks, cinema is not simply something participants study – it becomes the world they live in.’
In Diaz’s own filmography, duration is never merely stylistic – it functions as an ethical position. Over more than two decades, he has assembled a body of work – Norte, the End of History; From What Is Before; The Woman Who Left – that operates almost entirely outside the pacing conventions of commercial cinema, work that has earned him a Golden Lion in Venice, a Golden Leopard in Locarno, and a Silver Bear in Berlin. Critics tend to describe the experience of watching his films less in terms of viewing than of enduring: remaining with a shot well past the point at which a conventional edit would have cut away, until duration itself begins to carry the film’s argument about history, interiority, and grief.
In Bologna, the same instinct governed his teaching. Diaz spent the program’s early days dismantling habits – pressing his group to trust an inner voice, resist imitation, think independently, and abandon the algorithmic pacing and prefabricated narrative beats so much of contemporary filmmaking now defaults to. He was not handing out rules of thumb about coverage and cutaways. He pushed them toward a harder question: how much time does a story actually require, and what does it mean to grant it that time?
In his own work, the answer is almost invariably: more. A static shot of someone walking down a road, held well past its narrative necessity, becomes less a device than an invitation – a way for viewer and subject to inhabit the same moment together. For Diaz, extending a scene is itself an act of attention, a resource increasingly scarce in an industry organized around cutting things down.
It showed, too, in how he carried himself among the group. Diaz spent those two weeks walking the city with the filmmakers, working through scripts over coffee, remaining present on set instead of delegating from a distance. He dissolved much of the hierarchy that typically separates master from student, treating mentorship as a matter of proximity rather than authority – giving the group as much of his time as he has ever given his films.
He told me none of that stopped at nightfall. Diaz said he made himself reachable around the clock, and recalled being woken at 2 a.m. by one of them with a question. He never minded it, he said.
The first week was given over to philosophy and aesthetics; the second was considerably rougher. In the days that remained, participants wrote, cast, shot, and edited original shorts using local actors and Bologna’s own architecture as backdrop. The schedule was unforgiving – long days, unfamiliar locations, crews assembled from peers who, only weeks earlier, had been strangers.
Diaz declined to impose a standardized runtime or stylistic template, guiding the group through production without prescribing length, on the premise that durational choices could be refined later, in the edit. Emotional clarity and staying present within a scene mattered more than technical polish, even when the calendar argued otherwise.
The shared pressure did what pressure often does: it pulled the group together. Fifteen filmmakers from fifteen countries had arrived with fifteen different ways of seeing; they left having made films together, under the same guidance, on the same clock. Time, by the end, was no longer something to manage. It was something they had endured together.
The MF CINE tattoo emerged from that same crucible of shared time, and it is worth being precise about what it actually says. MF stands for motherf-ing – an intensifier I have heard Diaz use often myself, back home in Queens, whenever he is talking about the thing he cares about most. CINE is not merely appended for effect: it is a legitimate, dictionary-recognized shortening of cinema in Italian, used both independently and as the root of compound words such as cineclub and cinepresa. It carries a parallel resonance in the Philippines – while the standard Filipino word for cinema is sine, itself borrowed from the Spanish cine, the word Cine survives intact in the names of historic Philippine movie houses, among them Cine Adarna, the storied theater at the University of the Philippines Film Institute. In both languages this group of filmmakers shared, cine stands on its own as a real word – the tattoo is not shorthand invented on the spot. Read in full, MF CINE lands less like a cryptic code than an inside joke elevated into a rallying cry: a phrase close enough to Diaz’s own manner of speaking about film that his students chose to wear it. Krunic’s account of how it happened, once she learned of it, made clear that this was not typical, even by IFA’s standards. ‘The night before departure someone said, ‘Let’s get a tattoo.’ We thought it was a joke,’ she said. ‘But then Lav and a group of his students actually did it.’ On their final day in Bologna, the phrase went under the needle, and it is now etched onto arms scattered across the world, each one carrying, in Krunic’s words, ‘a memory of the extraordinary two weeks they shared.’ She called it ‘something beyond a masterclass, something that had never happened in any previous edition of IFA.’ They had lived together, created together, faced challenges, and learned from one another. In a very short time, they had become a community – no longer simply a teacher and his students, but filmmakers connected by something they had lived, created, and experienced together. The films themselves, she said, will become part of these filmmakers’ careers. The friendships, and the tattoos, may well outlast them: ‘a reminder of what they discovered together: that sometimes, when we share something deeply meaningful, it becomes a part of who we are.’
None of this comes without cost, and Krunic was candid about where things currently stand. IFA now operates within what she describes as ‘a powerful cultural ecosystem’ of institutional partners – the Cineteca di Bologna, the Municipality of Bologna, the Emilia-Romagna Film Commission, Fondazione MAST, the University of Bologna, and Palazzo Boncompagni – all confirmed official program partners, though tuition and outside funding continue to cover the bulk of the costs. The academy’s most pressing need, she said, is long-term backing capable of funding scholarships and keeping the program open ‘to exceptional talent, regardless of economic background.’ At the same time, she said IFA is entering ‘a new phase, exploring the meeting point between cinema, artificial intelligence, and immersive storytelling,’ with ambitions to become ‘one of the world’s leading centres for the next generation of filmmakers.’
Asked how she would pitch a prospective funder directly, Krunic did not hedge. ‘Today, more than ever, emerging filmmakers need time to go deeper,’ she said. ‘In a world of constant speed and distraction, IFA creates a rare space where filmmakers can step away from the noise, work intensely with a great auteur, and discover their own voice.’ For a supporter, she argued, backing IFA means joining ‘a lasting cultural vision’ – one in which the city itself, during Il Cinema Ritrovato, becomes part of the creative process, and where the resulting network now spans more than 30 countries. ‘We are not simply creating films,’ she said. ‘We are nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and building a global community that can continue to grow long after they leave Bologna. For me, investing in IFA means investing in the future language of cinema.’
New York has no real equivalent – no two-week window in which an emerging filmmaker receives a major auteur’s undivided attention and nothing else to occupy them but the work itself. Diaz did not come home with a lesson plan, or a manifesto. He came home with a tattoo, still healing, glimpsed under the fluorescent lights of a takeout counter in Queens.
For anyone looking to apply or support the program, the International Filmmaking Academy can be reached through internationalfilmmakingacademy.com, by email at ifa.bologna@internationalfilmmakingacademy.com, Instagram at @internationalfilmmakingacademy or by phone at +39 349 848 0636. IFA is based at Via Santo Stefano 52 in central Bologna. Tuition for accepted participants – covering masterclass instruction, festival access to Il Cinema Ritrovato, and two weeks of housing, with travel and meals arranged separately – currently runs pound 5,000 per participant. Scholarship support to widen access for exceptional talent regardless of economic background remains, according to Krunic, the academy’s most urgent unmet need.