Khavn
The Devil of Comparisons (original title: El Demonio de las Comparaciones), was a 30-hour black & white silent film from 1929 by Narding Salome Exelsio (1883-1949). It explores the cyclical lives, deaths, and rebirths of Jose Rizal and his characters (played by hitherto unidentified actors) in a wasteland ruled by demons.
This is a special performance by Khavn de la Cruz, performed and recorded during the first day of the online Film Pantun Workshop organised by SeaShorts Film Society.
Borrowing Bukowski’s interpretations, the boundlessly inventive director, poet, pianist Khavn conducts unquestionably odd, bizarrely fascinating spectacle, shot on 10 various cameras (including Super8).
This is not a film by Khavn. A crime-thriller retro-road movie based on the Kuratong Baleleng Rubout Massacre of 1995.
1901, Balangiga. Eight-year-old Kulas flees town with his grandfather and their carabao to escape General Smith's Kill & Burn order. He finds a toddler amid a sea of corpses and together, the two boys struggle to survive the American occupation.
To reimage, rewrite, and reread my country’s bastard history, using dismembered icons and scenographies that both affirm and negate remembered mythology.
The filmmaker is fairly young, otherwise you could say this extremely long film is Khavn’s life's work. Because it is so long and the maker is Filipino, you might think he is following in the footsteps of Lav Diaz, but this is very different, more experimental, documentary-surrealistic cinema. A collection of images like Jonas Mekas also makes, although Manila is not New York. Khavn started shooting this diary 22 years ago, and in the course of time he has made recordings with all sorts of cameras, from analogue video8 via mini-DV to iPhone. He does not present the recordings in chronological order, however.
A bunch of 10-year-old kids rob pedestrians and kill without a mercy. But after a failed bank robbery, the dangerous game comes to an end with twenty years of imprisonment. After two decades, they are released but soon begin to disappear one by one.
What can a family do if someone disappears in a dictatorship? You can’t go to the police for help or information. Many families were affected in this way by the cruelty of the Marcos dictatorship (1972-1986). The film shows one of them as an example of paradise lost.
A merciless hit man rescues a prostitute from a violent incident in a Philippine slum before the two take flight. Though Khavn, a standard-bearer of the digital age in the Philippines, has already established himself as a director of countless films, he is also an accomplished poet and musician. The bewildering visuals and punk-opera soundtrack expertly convey a world that extends far beyond the dialogue. As the story unfolds, a poetic sentiment wafts out of the chaos, signaling a collision of the director’s many talents.
EDSA XXX takes us on a wild ride through the ups and downs, twists and turns in the life of one man’s downfall and the rise to fame of another. The present leader KULOG NEGRO has led the country to progress; his rallying call is championing poverty for the benefit of tourists and film festivals. But the well-meaning leader is a mere puppet in the political arena and someone has just decided that he has to go.
A merman is washed not ashore but into the heart of a bustling metro. Disoriented, he walks around and runs into several characters, all of them in the middle of their nightly grind.
Structural feature film about a burning piano.
Love letters from a relationship between Cameroon and the Philippines.
Documentary profiling the directors involved in the loose Philippine New Wave filmmaking movement.
Tony de Guzman is an anti-hero. Life, according to him, is short, brutal. It’s never on your side. Grab what you can, when you can. Settle scores. Be randy. Defy the rules. Cheat the system. Toughen it out. Tony knows nothing but tough times living, as he does, in the bleak circus of the slums he calls home. This is his story and the story of the world he lives in: a hopeless, closed-in decrepit world gone to seed. MONDOMANILA is an unflinching and unflinchingly funny look at life in the underbelly of the urban diaspora … with songs.
The directors want to shoot a film about a man known as the son of god. But what starts out as a practical joke, extends to become a curious portrait of what could either be a petty fraud or the world’s most secret miracle. A film crew tracks his bizarre pilgrimage as magic and religion, faith and doubt, real and unreal blur and melt to the point that one of the director becomes one of the characters. The film traverses all descriptions, before ending as both an affirmation of faith for the faithless and a criticism of faith for the overly faithful.
A short documentary on how one family lives out each day to earn their daily bread. How one man's trash is literally transformed into this family's treasure.
I am the drowning sea. Waxing, waning, vanishing, surrendering, yearning, drunk, helpless against your indifference, with no way out. You are the shore that never saves. I will wait for you to turn into a wave. And we will waltz. Drown together.
Farewell, to all I love. To die is to rest, writes Jose Rizal, and where his poem ends, "Ultimo" begins. It is a black-and-white silent film, with scenes from the director's meanderings in La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain) inspired by Rizal's poem, which was written a day before the hero's execution in 1896. It explores identity and nationhood as viewed through a post-colonial lens.
"Overdosed Nightmare" is Kidlat Tahimik's "Perfumed Nightmare" without the perfume, a pure nightmare set in wounded Manila, a close-up view of all that gangrene and pus. A gang of rat-munching, homophobic bums kill the night clumsily. Jesus H. Christ gets crucified for the nth time in Dagger Island. A greaseman, the image model for Poverty, bums around the Edsa Revolution anniversary which ousts another corrupt president, Estrada the actor. And Tony D., the shrewd short-fused citizen of the Philippine ghetto, sets his sights on foreign classmate Steve Banners, a pompous self-righteous dude with delusions of America's grandeur at the expense of Third World inequity.
Filmmaker John Torres describes his childhood and discusses his father's infidelities.
A man fantasizes about horses and sleeps with a woman.
Hapon is an 8-year-old survivor in the slums of modern Manila, scratching out an improvised existence at the margins of society. This rawly shot documentary follows Hapon and his mates as they swagger around their dilapidated universe. Featuring a punk-rock score by director Khavn's band the Brockas, the film captures a carefree spirit in the children that completely belies the squalid conditions in which they live.
Who are you waiting for? How long have you been waiting? How much longer can you wait? In the calm after the storm comes the unbearable longing for the elusive One.
'Kamias' weaves images of the artist's family and personal life with a strong, if not sad, narrative thread. In concise, poetic narration, Khavn takes us deep into the psyche of a young artist.
Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.
A minute of a life. Bored to death. What is life? A series of moving stills. "Buryong" captures sixty-seconds-in-a-life, Philippine-time. From mundane chores, to work, to scenes of domesticity, to killing time, we are asked to observe and meditate on these moments. A lot can happen in the span of a minute. An entire lifetime even. Buryong is an epistle to time and to boredom. This could be your minute; this could be your life. How are you spending it?
The Pinoy vampire - a bloodthirsty Aswang - stalks the streets of Quezon City in search of fresh victims while attempting to stay one step ahead of a dangerous human predator. This is not a film by Khavn. Gruesome and grisly murders are our entry point into the psyche of the Aswang of Quezon City. More a meditation on the workings of a disturbed mind than a detective thriller, it nonetheless shows us a cat and mouse mind game. We watch and squirm in terror as the Pinoy vampire strikes again and again. Contains scenes of extreme this, that ... and the other thing.
The Pinoy vampire - a bloodthirsty Aswang - stalks the streets of Quezon City in search of fresh victims while attempting to stay one step ahead of a dangerous human predator. Gruesome and grisly murders are our entry point into the psyche of the Aswang of Quezon City. More a meditation on the workings of a disturbed mind than a detective thriller, it nonetheless shows us a cat and mouse mind game. We watch and squirm in terror as the Pinoy vampire strikes again and again. © Mubi
These boys know the dual essence of rugby: playing football and sniffing solvent. They tell vampire jokes, rap about river deaths, and dive like jack-knives into the murky water. The cruel irony of the hope these children bring.
Renegade filmmaker Khavn turns traditional Filipino values on their head in this surreal and taboo-shattering allegory about a family that dines exclusively on soil. Her birthday fast approaching, the baby wishes that for once her family could have a normal meal as her big sister has group sex on camera while pining for their wholesome next-door neighbor. Meanwhile, their gangster big brother commits a heinous act of murder before seeing his best friend killed and being pursued by the police; dad injects hospital children with experimental chemicals; mom peddles drugs and hookers on a seedy cable television show; and grandpa is a zombie. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
A black comedy film, which focuses on two film workers, Raffy, the clapper, and Dido, a utility boy. Both share the same dream: to direct their own films someday. Their lives as mere "small production people" took a different turn when, together with the people in the unit van they were riding,had an encounter with armed men. Their co-workers were killed, and the two of them were forced to drive the unit van out of fear until it ran out of gas. The van contains equipment for movie production like cameras, lights and film stocks. They ended up in a secluded barrio not yet reached by modern technology, and therefore, the townsfolk knew nothing of the movie industry.
Absurdist short comedy in the best camp and gore tradition. Little Ali has the handicap as a boxer that he keeps crying continually and heartrendingly. As a result, he keeps losing his bouts with the lightweight boxing champion Mad Cow. One day he sees an advertisement by the Klinika Lakrima, where they can operate to remove his tear ducts. Sensitivity is not the right word to describe this operation.
Strikingly captivating and accessible short film by someone who tends to make more experimental and raw films, even though the situation in the film is raw enough as it is. We follow Piling, a young soccer fanatic, through a slum district of Manila. No ball or cleats, but a Coke can and flip-flops are the ingredients for a virtuoso demonstration of the football art. Only at the end does it become apparent why the little ball juggler will never be a Ronaldinho.
Bayani S. Makapili is an ordinary guy who is a big fan of action movies, especially the ones starring Bida, the #1 action hero in the land. One fateful day, Bayani’s life imitates that of his idol, but with different results. The audience is presented with five-and-a-half different endings.
The "prequel" to "Three Days Of Darkness" aka "Tatlong Araw Ng Kadiliman" starring Katya Santos, Gwen Garci, and Precious Adona. Khavn draws on the Book of Revelation for one of the most frightening phenomenon prophesied to happen. Three girls are trapped in their home as the Three Days of Darkness descend on the Earth and they must cope and try to fend off the demons that have come to take them. A chilling vision of God's Wrath or of people imposing God's Wrath on one another, the film frightens with its questions as much as it does with its visuals.
An American gets killed by a Filipino. Early version of the later feature film.
The start of the film sets the tone. A tortured man looks as if he will castrate himself. Later he staggers aimlessly and bleeding heavily through the streets of a town that is just waking up. In parallel, the film shows the marital discussions of a couple, with the husband hiding behind the camera.
Khavn is jack of all trades. In this case he brings an improvised homage to the great silent slapstick tradition. In the idiom of the silent film, but with the absurdist humour of Dada, he presents two brothers who wear the traditional Filipino barong. They are looking for two missing brothers, but in fact mainly get in each other's way. The necessary colourful slapstick extras cross their path as well.
An unedited blur of random images from a day in a life of Jesus Corazon, the serial rapist-killer of Manila who collects women's hearts in glass jars. Mixed with snuff & other found footage. Accompanied by a non-sequitur deluge of distorted guitar, a synthetic piano orchestra, drum&bass, and abstract spokenword poetry.
Kommander Kulas wakes up several times and dreams that he is a giant cockroach. He wakes up for the last time and sees there are stitches on his chest: Someone has stolen his heart during the night. So along with his best and only friend, The Poor Carabao, he ventures the long and unwinding road of Kamias, which spans the vast landscape of the Philippines, to look for his missing heart. Kommander Kulas, the official fool, meets several hearty characters in the tarot card deck of his journey. Lovesong numbers are scattered throughout the film. In the end, Kommander Kulas does not find his heart. He has a heart attack in the middle of the road. The end.
The dark man crosses the purgatorial blight bearing his cargoes of sin, his blasted pilgrimage like some fever dream passion play, a primordial hallucination soaked in doom and grime.
"The Twelve" is a pre-apocalyptic vision reminiscent in theme to Hal Hartley's 2000 As Seen By film "The Book Of Life". This feature-length genre-bending digital work features scenes of "The Apostles" drinking the night away while waiting for the Second Coming of Christ, interpolated with musical vignettes that evoke but take further the shattered narrative of "Breaking The Waves". "The Twelve" is a deceptive postmodern work that explored themes of faith, redemption, and contemporary values, and balances satire, science fiction, and social critique.
"Philippine Bliss" tells the tale of six modern-day Filipinos living in a single neighborhood, a housing project called B.L.I.S.S., started by the former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos during the Martial Law era. These people, whose names allude to familiar characters from Jose Rizal's novels, narrate their private yet vivid stories of loss, longing, and Third World despair, all intersecting in a public arena that is their packed community. Theirs are lives seen with an oftentimes comic eye, unabashedly bound by a wild and brimming sense of Filipino hope.
