Khavn goes to Venice with German ‘Gandalf’

Khavn dela Cruz

Filipino filmmaker Khavn dela Cruz is headed to the world’s oldest film festival, Venice, next month.

“Happy Lamento,” Dela Cruz’s collaboration with German cinema stalwart Alexander Kluge, is part of the lineup of the Giornate degli Autori program, the indie showcase of the 75th Venice International Film Festival, set in Italy from Aug. 29 to Sept. 8.

Dela Cruz recalled that his coproducers Stephan Holl and Antoinette Köster of the “radical” German film label Rapid Eye Movies had shared with Kluge his 2016 movie, “Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember.”

Written by coproducer Achinette Villamor, “Alipato” is about “kid gangs set in the futuristic, no-future Mondomanila universe.”

“Alexander liked it so much that he incorporated it into his film, which was supposed to be the last episode of his longest running TV show,” the Filipino director told the Inquirer.

He summed up “Happy Lamento,” thus: “This cinematic constellation revolves around four things: the electric light, the circus, the song ‘Blue Moon’ and Mondomanila.”

He described Kluge, dubbed by producer Gertjan Zuilhof as the “Gandalf of German Arts and Culture,” as a “very warm and generous soul.”

“Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember”

They’ve never had a face-to-face encounter, though. Their interactions were limited to Skype and e-mail. “We started Skyping after he had already made the rough cut of the film.”

Kluge edited the “found footage” film in his studio in Munich, combining various images (of Trump, gorillas, circus acts) with scenes from “Alipato.”

The collaboration made him realize that “cinema, like music, is malleable.”

He quipped that the merging of their divergent styles was akin to “a combustible Edison.”

He hailed Kluge’s work as “very avant-garde, at the same time, very old school—‘ancient cinema,’ as our hero Eisenstein called it.”

Several items are on his to-do list when he flies to Italy on Sept. 1: “Meet Alexander Kluge in the flesh, hang with friends, overdose on gelato, drown in Venetian wine, and sink a gondola.”

Will “Happy Lamento” lead to more collaborations?

“We plan to do a surrealist reworking of the Orpheus myth—a sort of antisequel to [my 2014 film] ‘Ruined Heart: Another Lovestory Between A Criminal & A Whore,’” he related.

Being invited to Venice, Dela Cruz enthused, brought him “exquisite happiness. [It’s] a much welcome respite from the overwhelming chaos that goes with publicly exhibiting our film ‘Balangiga: Howling Wilderness’ in local theaters on Aug. 15 [as part of the Pista ng Pelikulang Pilipino].”

Established in 2004, Giornate degli Autori is modeled after Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and seeks “to draw attention to high-quality cinema, without any kind of restriction.”