Khavn dela Cruz
A retrospective of Filipino filmmaker Khavn dela Cruz’s films is ongoing at La Casa Encendida in Madrid.
For one whole month, 13 of the Filipino director’s films are showcased in the social and cultural center located in the heart of Madrid, Spain.
To cap the retro, Khavn’s 2012 film “Mondomanila: How I Fixed My Hair After a Rather Long Journey” will be screened on May 30.
The other films in the lineup are: “Memory of Dawn” (1997), “Amen, A Brown Comedy” (1998), “Can & Slippers” (2004), “Rugby Boyz” (2005), “Toxic Mango: The Incredibly Heart-Rending and Fantastically Forbidden Legend of the Toxic Mango That Bestows a Multitude of Lessons to All Brave Citizens of the New Planet Alibuhod” (2006), “Squatterpunk” (2007), “Misericordia: The Last Mystery of Kristo Vampiro” (2013), “Ruined Heart: Another Love Story Between a Criminal & a Whore” (2014), “Desparadiso: Corrido and the Lives Lived By the Three Prince Brothers, Children of the King Fernando and the Queen Valeriana of the Kingdom of Berbania” (2015), “Filipiniana” (2015), “Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember” (2016) and “Aswang [1933]” (2017).
Highlights
Highlights of the event include yesterday’s workshop and a performance/screening tomorrow. The master class is dubbed, “This is not a Film Workshop,” while the concert-film showing is called “Wazak, Wazak, Wazakest!”
Also tomorrow, seven short films by Khavn will be presented, along with works by Spanish filmmakers, Luis Buñuel and Segundo de Chomon.
Khavn told the Inquirer: “What is it like for a filmmaker from a previously colonized country to be given a tribute in the land of his 300-year ex-Euromaster? To quote a fellow former slave of our second-longest colonizer, God Bless Amerika: ‘It feels good!’”
Political motive
He added, half in earnest, half in jest: “Inspired by the film ‘Argo,’ I will use cinema as an excuse for a political motive: To avenge our country by searching for the descendants of all Spaniards involved in the murder of Jose Rizal.”
According to organizers, Khavn’s films “are sprinkled with gore, vampires and zombies.” The website lauds the Filipino auteur’s works as “documents, sometimes delirious, of an unpredictable and extreme world that [he] represents, with an overwhelming creative freedom.”