Lavrente Indico Diaz uses the characteristically long form of "slow cinema" not only to question cinematic concepts of time and space, but (with it) also commercial filmmaking. Since 2017, he has been a member of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences himself, completely unsolicited, as he explains in the Viennale Podcast with Alexandra Zawia. His works are tools of mourning, confrontation, memory, investigation, meditation, resistance, as is ESSENTIAL TRUTHS OF THE LAKE. "A forlorn investigator looking for answers in a devastated area, I loved the irony," Diaz describes it. He has never been asked about his shampoo, but his love of black-and-white films can be traced back to his father's film addiction: "He took me on a three-hour bus ride to the next town to watch eight black and white films every weekend, from Hollywood to Hong Kong, from the Spaghetti Westerns of Italy to the Slapstick Cinema of the Philippines. I found it terrible. But now I'm grateful. He was my film school, and that's why my visual cortex is black and white."