Khavn

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. (Allmovie)

K. loves Ana. Then Ana went missing. But now she's back. And so is K. The walk through the old school. The strange encounters. The eye doctor. The rekindled memories. Chance? Or design? What we talk about when we talk about love are the things unsaid. The words that fail. The lovesongs in your head. The poetry between the lines. (drlightbearer)

If films were time machines, what memory would you yank from your past and preserve? A tale of two men--one hopeful, the other desperate--"Breather" takes place in the last two weeks of the filmmaker's life a month before his father died. Like a page torn from a diary that hasn't been written yet, it is, for Khavn, an oddly contemplative retreat into the warm ache of nostalgia and the inevitability of abrupt goodbyes. (.MOV)

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 sounds and visuals. (Khavn)

Filmed in just one day, Squatterpunk follows an eight year old Slum King named Hapon, a cocky would-be gangster with a Travis Bickle haircut, and his rat-bag minions through one of the thousands of shanty towns that spring up between the cracks in the Manila pavements. (imdb)

This travel-shockumentary-vampire fiction could well be a disguised ode to the Mondo films of Jacopetti, but with Khavn you never really know. Our guide is Kristo Vampiro, who admits in a voice-over that he is willing to go very far to quench his thirst for blood. The entirely blood-red images show the continual self-castigation of people in the street, juxtaposed with cock fights and acted crucifixions, complete with mouth-organ music.

When violence is the only life you know, will love save you or just unravel everything? (imdb)

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. (imdb)

The life of a Filipino street gang through the years.

A reinvention of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in contemporary Manila as a rock musical.

For Happy Lamento, Kluge mixed some of his weirder TV skits on electricity, the circus, revolution and early cinema (featuring Fassbinder-regular Peter Berling, theatre genius Heiner Müller, and DaDaism's last man standing, Helge Schneider, among others) with some of the more outrageous scenes from Khavn's 2016 Ang Napakaigsing Buhay Ng Alipato. Some 2017 G20 shots of Merkel and Trump et al inject the already heady brew with current affairs urgency. Expect the unexpected! (iffr.com)

Boy meets girl. But no, it's not about that or the giddiness of a new romance. It's about untimely death (no one's sure of anything these days), true love, soul mates. It's about the gun and the rose. Genre bending. Heart breaking. An avalanche of colors. Deadpan romance. Lips syncing, singing. What's love got to do with it? Everyone has a broken heart. (imdb)

In U.S.-occupied Philippines, a small boy flees his hometown with his grandpa and must survive the wilderness with a toddler he takes under his wing. (Netflix)

Tony knows nothing but tough times, living in the bleak circus of the slums he calls home amongst denizens of the underworld: the crippled pimp, the lonely housewife, the neighborhood gay and his macho father, the prostitutes, the small-time politician, and the Yankee pedophile. (imdb)

It doesn't matter that in many cases the pictures are magenta or oddly pixellated, as Khavn gets at 'em with every mad editing move he knows, plus all his accumulated grading ninjutsu to craft a cacophony of sounds and images that howls and hollers like the soul of the eternally oppressed Philippines, rising again and again for another battle to finally be free.

Lost cinema. Lost culture. Lost country. Lost people. How to recreate the past with nothing? Cinema of the impossible. The silent past is a horror film. The smell of nitrate in the morning. How many ghosts can the cinema contain? 75 films. 22 years. What is the numerological significance? Too late. Never too late.