“One of underground digital cinema’s best-kept secrets: a prankster punk, an ass-kicking rebel priest.”
—Olaf Moeller, Film Comment
“Very likely the world’s most prolific major filmmaker, tethered to no genre or tradition except his own commitment to radical cinema’s capacity to change audiences.”
—Robert Koehler, Variety
With 52 features and 150+ shorts to his name, some of which were shot in a single day, the work of poet/musician/filmmaker Khavn De La Cruz is so voluminous and eclectic as to defy classification. From families that eat soil to kids that smoke cigarettes and fuck geese to innocent orphans caught up in historical massacres, the only guarantee that comes when you watch a movie by Khavn is that you’re going to get your senses rocked and your world turned upside down. These are films that embrace their own abrasive edges, delighting in imperfection as a symbol of artistic freedom and an iconoclastic struggle against the stifling order of things. More than characters or plots, Khavn builds his films on music, color, and grotesque non sequiturs, taking any and every opportunity to deviate from the expected and indulge in whatever odd detail or sequence strikes his fancy. With the Mad Max production design of ALIPATO and the aggressive transgressiveness of his lo-fi digital cinematography, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that his films have often been labeled as punk. Yet there’s a sensitivity and patience in these films, a contemplative openness to portraying the world in all its documentary messiness, that goes beyond any labels.
We’re proud to present a retrospective of his work, even if it is just a smattering of his total output, and will be showing five films throughout the month: THE FAMILY THAT EATS SOIL; RUINED HEART: ANOTHER LOVE STORY BETWEEN A CRIMINAL AND A WHORE; ALIPATO: THE VERY BRIEF LIFE OF AN EMBER; BAMBOO DOGS; and BALANGIGA, along with a handful of shorts selected to accompany every feature. Wazak!
Dir. Khavn, 2005
The Philippines. 75 min
In Tagalog and Spanish with English subtitles
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 – 10 PM
“Soil again? Soil for breakfast, soil for lunch, soil for dinner. Even for snacks. Don’t tell me we’ll be having soil on my first birthday.”
An iconoclastic take-down of the Filipino family unit delivered in a spasm of manic gonzo energy, THE FAMILY THAT EATS SOIL is so vicious in its satire that at one point even the subtitles stop translating what characters are saying and start making fun of them instead. Based on Khavn’s prose poem of the same name, the titular family is just your average middle class five person unit – Dad sneaks into the hospital and turns cancerous children into vegetables, Mom hosts a reality show where she tours brothels and drug dens, Sis can’t stop thinking of rape, Bro tortures immigrants, and Baby smokes cigarettes and frequents cock fights.
“A hyper-condensed punk-trash take on Phillipine family politics. At times it plays like a de-Pasoliniized version of Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q, at others like an absurdist experimental Bomba flick. Yet it always feels like cinema is about to end and only no-holds-barred videomaking can save the world.”
—Olaf Moeller, Film Comment
Screening with:
GREASEMAN
Dir. Khavn, 2002
The Philippines. 13 min
In Tagalog with English subtitles
PORNOMAN
Dir. Khavn
The Philippines. 3 min
In Tagalog with English subtitles
THE PUSHCART FAMILY
Dir. Khavn
The Philippines. 4 min
In Tagalog with English subtitles
Dir. Khavn, 2014
The Philippines. 73 min
In Tagalog with English subtitles
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 – 10 PM
A punk noir opera lensed by Christopher Doyle, starring Tadanobu Asano, and set to the music of Stereo Total, RUINED HEART manages to be one of Khavn’s most ambitious and high-profile works without sacrificing any of his gonzo, free-form, DIY energy. As the title suggests, the set-up is purely archetypical, a gangster and his moll piss off the boss and have to hit the road, so much so that the characters are even introduced simply by generic monikers instead of names. Yet you don’t go watch a film by Khavn for the plot, you go for the visual poetry and upbeat spirit of rebellion and this generic template is an apt structure for a series of wild music numbers shot in a woozy, drunken camera-style and adorned with all sorts of decadent, punk-ish production design.
Screening with:
BARONG BROTHERS
Dir. Khavn
The Philippines. 10 min
In Tagalog with English subtitles
SMALL ALI
Dir. Khavn
The Philippines. 8 min
In Tagalog with English subtitles
Dir. Khavn, 2016
The Philippines. 88 min
In Tagalog with English subtitles
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 – 10 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 – 10 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26 – 7:30 PM
Long live children. Fucking hope of the country and other bullshit. We are the priests. We are the fucking castrators. We are the fucking blood of rats. We are the fucking sweat of roaches. Here classrooms are wasted if they aren’t turned into whorehouses and drug dens.
Mondomanila, 2025. A landscape dominated by tombstones and trash heaps. A gang of child criminals are out for a big score. When they get their chance, the job goes wrong of course and the boss ends up in jail. 30 years later and he’s on the streets again, but everything seems to be exactly as it is. Nothing ever changes in Mondomanila, the kids still spend their days smoking cigarettes and beating each other up while the cops still hang out in the back of a pig slaughterhouse-cum-brothel, stuffing their faces and taking graft. Khavn colors this all with a vibrant, kaleidoscopic production design that combines a documentary eye for real places and people with punk apocalyptic costumes that would feel at home in a Mad Max movie.
Screening with:
CAN & SLIPPERS
Dir. Khavn, 2005
The Philippines. 2 min
In Tagalog with English subtitles
A used can and a foot. A whole world and a garbage heap. All this and less in 2 minutes.
“It might be Khavn’s entire oeuvre’s symbolic focal point. Viewers might swoon over the bravura opening montage, be stunned by the realization that the film’s badass soccer player is actually a one-legged kid hobbling on crutches, and then be blown away when he bends it like Beckham, but there’s always a feeling that, for all it’s joy and playfulness, this is much closer to the ugly truth of the Pinoy condition then one would like to admit.”
—Olaf Moeller, Film Comment
RUGBY BOYZ
Dir. Khavn, 2006
The Philippines. 8 min
In Tagalog with English subtitles
Dir. Khavn, 2018
The Philippines. 81 min
In Tagalog with English subtitles
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 – Midnight
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 – 10 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26 – 10 PM
Based on a real life 1995 execution of a group of prisoners at the hands of the police, BAMBOO DOGS crafts a sharp character study of the victims of this incident, shying away from the abrasive tone common to many of Khavn’s other works without blunting his ability to continually surprise. Set over the course of one long night, the film follows the prisoners as they are shuttled around Quezon City in the back of a police van while under the impression that their release is imminent. Khavn’s real masterstroke comes in the decision to depict this one fateful night as something rather ordinary and mundane, deflating most of the drama in favor of endless banter between criminals and cops about how great it is to be a gangster and the merits of circumcision. This is (not) a film by Khavn though, so expect some hypnagogic dream sequences and one hell of a musical number.
Screening with:
FILIPINIANA
Dir. Khavn, 2016
The Philippines, 13 minutes
In Tagalog with English subtitles
“history is a dead cow in a funnel pretending to be a detuned bassoon serenading the moon halved by expectations not so great that new emperors bow their decapitated heads but 3 cakes are always better than 3 cents in this madly turning world peeking pecking ducktards for a midnight snack on the run.”
—Khavn’s description of the film.
Dir. Khavn, 2017
The Philippines. 112 min
In Tagalog with English subtitles
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 7:30 PM
Set in 1901 during the American occupation of the Philippines, BALANGIGA: HOWLING WILDERNESS, is a hallucinogenic western road trip through a violent landscape. Fleeing the town of Balangiga, the site of a real massacre by the Americans, 8 year old Kulas, his grandfather, their ox, and the orphaned toddler whom they rescued, encounter all sorts of surreal figures in the wilderness. From chronically masturbating shamans (experimental Filipino animator Roxlee in a cameo) to desperate Americans lost in the forest to swooping drone shots over-saturated colors, Khavn crafts a unique blend of brutality, absurdity, childish reverie, and desperation.
Screening with:
ULTIMO: DIFFERENT WAYS OF KILLING A NATIONAL HERO
Dir. Khavn, 2006
The Philippines. 6 min
In Tagalog with English subtitles
“Khavn’s poignant, black-and-white riff on Filipino national hero Jose Rizal is reflective of the director’s restless experimentation and unmistakable energy. Shot in Spain (the Philippines’ former colonizer) in about a week, the abstract string of scenes of play and contemplation has a thrown-together feel but deepens with the intricate flamenco guitar score (the movie’s is otherwise silent) and the intertitles of Rizal’s proud-martyr verse.”
—Nicolas Rapold, Film Comment