Philippines, Film, 2024, in Berlin
Khavn
Khavn De La Cruz, or simply Khavn, is not one to appease through decorum. Playing on the edge of cataclysm, his creative practice is prolific and expansive, embracing an inspired and at times unexpected array of mediums and collaborators. He grabbed hold of the democratizing possibilities of digital technology that opened the way for a Philippine No Wave at the turn of the millennium and reduced the need to compromise to the demands of industry moneymen. A deluge of low-cost, extravagantly bizarre films resulted (Khavn has made more than fifty features and 200 shorts since the mid-1990s). His films are loud rejections of the passivity imposed by resource deprivation in the Philippines, and of a mainstream willing to sweep out of view the grisly tyrannies of state and colonial history.
In Mondomanila (2012), a brief onslaught like a punk song, a man behatted like a circus master leads us down into Manila’s nighttime slums, home to a colorful array of tricksters, pimps, and thrill-chasers playing their best hand against desperation. Khavn does not pretend to restore solemn dignity to his compatriots in the face of global exploitation, governmental neglect, and brutality; rather, he seeks the irrepressible dynamism of life within the bedlam and absurdity of inflicted ruination, taking on the pain of a battered nation as poetic exorcism. Old myths are transformed and restaged by Khavn anew. In his second collaboration with Alexander Kluge, Orphea (2020), Lilith Stangenberg played the female Orpheus, in search of Euridiko in a Manila turned hellscape of fantasy.
Khavn is acutely aware that memory and resistance are collective, and he agitates against the erasure of the Filipino margins. He edited a 2010 book profiling key filmmakers of the Philippine No Wave, and has in his own films excavated movies of his forebears, bringing them into vivid dialogue with the present. Manila in the Fangs of Darkness (2008) reimagined Manila: In the Claws of Neon (1975) by Lino Brocka, a voice for the impoverished against state oppression, whose spirit of grassroots dissent continues to fire up No Wave directors, and to whose work Khavn also paid tribute in National Anarchist: Lino Brocka (2023).
Khavn’s novel Antimarcos, a maximalist, postmodern cry against the iron fist of structural poverty, won the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award (national book award) in 2022. That year, the accomplished pianist, composer, and theater director also staged the cross-genre production SMAK! SuperMacho AntiKristo: A Headless 100-Act Opera To Avenge All Bicycles Of The Universe According to Jarry & Rizal at Berlin’s Volksbühne. A futurist, anti-colonial revenge rock musical with a silent film component, its surrealist spectacle was inspired by two nineteenth-century renegades: French symbolist Alfred Jarry and Filipino resistance hero José Rizal. To enter Khavn’s orbit is to experience creativity as a joyous and dynamically generative, cross-pollinating way of being in the world and with others, in defiance of institutionalized power.
Text: Carmen Gray
