not the artist in focus: KHAVN – 19. UNDER|DOX 10-16 OKT

What is he not? Poet, surrealist, anarchist, anti-colonialist, filmmaker, musician, artist, designer, performer, world traveler. His moods: Revenge, underworld, necromancy, rituals, chaos, transformations, happy lamento. Love is: a dog from hell. His instruments: piano, film material, digital camera, fabrics, objects, people. His preferences: the bizarre, the extravagant, the exalted, the brute, the loud, the visible, the posterable. This is not the artist in focus: this is not Khavn.

Khavn, that’s just maybe Khavn de la Cruz, creator of the “this is not” films, emerged on the world’s festivals in the early 2000s as a prodigy and maladjusted bad boy of the Filipino digital wave. He is uncompromising and yet gets on well with the industry’s elders and respected figures. In Germany, his directorial collaborations with Alexander Kluge, his films with Lilith Stangenberg, who can be considered the most experimental German actress, his co-productions with the Cologne label “Rapid Eye Movies” and his DAAD residency in Berlin 2024 all bear witness to this. Khavn has made more than fifty feature films and over two hundred short films since the mid-1990s, often quick & dirty, thrown straight out of the genius into the world. He brings silent film back to life, accompanies it in ten-hour piano sessions, gathers musicians from the filmmakers’ band “The Brockas” around him and, of course, his offspring. His films originate from the angry world of Mondomanila, are directed against the forgetting of Philippine history, its literature and José Rizal, the people’s poet, rebel against the consequences of first Spanish and then American colonization, lick the wounds and drill deep into them. Khavn’s work about a maltreated country often seems maltreated itself, like the Filipino souls that wander through the vividly painted light and darkness of his shadow images.

UNDERDOX has been showing Khavn’s work since the very beginning. This year the master of negation is invited: this is not the artist in focus.

Makbetamaximus

“Double, double, toil and trouble,” indeed! Shakespeare’s punchiest tragedy gets a makeover in a way that only the prodigious Filipino multi-hyphenate Khavn De La Cruz could deliver. Unfolding in the Municipality of Marcos, Ilocos Norte, and Khavn’s own Burroughsian Interzone of Mondomanila, this mash-up of styles, genres, moods, and atmospheres features a cast of over 100 performers and defies any easy description, even with so familiar a text. – Ian Haydn Smith, IFF Rotterdam

KHAVN
PH 2024
80 min | Tagalog

Makamisa: Phantasm of Revenge

Khavn delivers a monster of a film, both epic and highly personal, set in the Philippines in the late 19th century, between two forms of colonialism, Spanish and American. The starting point is a text, ”Makamisa”, the outline of a novel left unfinished in the 1890s by the poet and revolutionary José Rizal – a veritable national treasure – in which he denounced religious abuse and oppression.
Passed through Khavn’s caustic and furiously political filter, the result is a film that looks like a fresco from the early days of cinema. An intense nightmare, and a not-so-distant past thrown into sharp relief, with obvious echoes in today’s Philippines. Soundtrack by David Toop, Khavn and the Kontra-Kino Orchestra – Nicolas Feodoroff, FID Marseille

KHAVN
PH, DE 2024
73 min | stumm, Zwischentitel: Baybayin

This Is Not a Lost Film

KHAVN
PH 2013 – 18
ca. 20 min | Cine-Concert

B+M+P+Sales: Khavn | DOP: Albert Banzon
E: Carlo Francisco Manatad, Jason Aquino, Jet Leyco | With Khavn, Ian Lomongo, Robin Palmes

The first Filipino silent movie, the first Filipino horror movie and the first Filipino science fiction movie – from the Imaginarium of KHAVN. Cine-Concert with the “Lost Film Trilogy”, consisting of “Filipiniana” (2016), “Aswang (1933)” (2017), and “Juan Tamad Goes to the Moon (1898)” (2018).

Kluge‘s 5th Birthday, 1937

KHAVN
PH/DE 2022
Deutsche Premiere
3 min | Englisch
B+M: Khavn | Mit 1delacruz, Khavn

Phantasma about the 5th birthday of Alexander Kluge, spoken from a child’s mouth. Continuation of to the artistic examination with the co-founder of New German Cinema.