Canon Decampment: Khavn

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1—Ang Pamilyang Kumakain ng Lupa

English Title: The Family That Eats Soil
Year of Release: 2005 / Color with Sepia
Director & Screenwriter: Khavn
Video Documentary: Eric Jose Pancho
Animation: Ulysses Veloso & Jan Sarmiento
Producers: Filmless Films, Be Movies Productions, Hubert Bals Fund

Cast: Carlo Catap, Hamid Eton, Elizabeth Marin, Gil Mendoza, Hazel Magno, Edward Vitto, Gigi Duque, Christian Guzman, Jocelyn Sibayan, Khavn, Flortecante Dayao, Ariel Mamburan, Jaymar Valenciano, Cris Villanueva, Kristine Kintana, Maricel Gajasan, Israel “Oblax” Balignasay, Adonis de la Cruz, Tasyo Caubalejo, Eric Jose Pancho, Joy Domingo, Vincent “Enteng” Viray, Pedro San Goku, Elmo Redrico, Marc Mendoza, Roy Mark “Omar” Gerez, Marlon dela Cruz, Merv Espina, Erenesto Garcia, Jessie L. Liwanag, Mario R. Monte, Salvador C. Ticman Jr., Norman Wilwayco, Narding de la Cruz, Kelly de la Cruz, Eva Bagao, Jansen Bagao

A family, comprising father, mother, brother, sister, and baby, converge at the dining table to partake of their meals, with their dead grandfather at the head. In the course of a whole day’s consumption, the various members also attend to their other concerns. The father poisons babies in a hospital, the brother tortures Chinese-Filipino entrepreneurs, the daughter gives vent to her lustful imagination, the baby, who objects to the serving of soil, is a bookie during cockfight sessions. Occasionally the grandfather gets up, recites poetic passages, and wanders around the city on foot, oblivious to the amusement of bystanders, while the mother, who has two doctoral degrees, is described as the family’s housemaid; later she narrates a documentary on city life, lapsing into Spanish, with her speech translated into German subtitles.

2—Ang Napakaigsing Buhay ng Alipato

English Title: Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember
Year of Release: 2016 / Color with B&W
Director: Khavn
Animation: Rox Lee & Khavn
Screenwriters: Khavn & Achinette Villamor
From a story by Brillante Mendoza
Producers: Kamias Overground & Rapid Eye Movies

Cast: Dido de la Paz, Khavn, Daniel Palisa, Bing Austria, Marti San Juan, Robin Palmes, Felix Opena, Danny Capawa, Champ, Rey Cardines, Wendell Mata, Marco Omana, Christian Mata, Clarence Sumalinog, King James Banaag, John Paul Langcas, Rodel Hate, Jimboy Layson, John Felix Tumarong, John Mark Ogarinola, Joanna Roselio, Angelo Brillo, Katrina Lacodini, Khavn, Ali Doron, Beth Chai, Girly Alvarez, Rina Doron, Othela, PJ Garcia, Lorein Garcia, Rosie, Wilson Quintero, Gina Balahibo, Justine Hipolito, Rolly Montivis, Maria Vasinopa, Fausta Celtino, Rosita Macabenta, Ariane Canonoy, Monaliza Layson, Perla Bichanino, Milagros lacodini, Ivory Alajar, Caezar Acol, Kristine Kintana, Charita Castinlag, Manuel Abejano, Danny Banaag, Ferdinand Diaz, Ric Resuello, Jet Nunez, Marco Polo, Santie Navarro, Rolando Salem, Joseph Pelaez, Bartolome Nati, Danny Dominera, Brigitte Salvatore, Rey Paraon, Grace Soriano, Eliza Mendoza

In Ulingan, a slum territory where residents scrape by through coal production, street kids form a group and call themselves D’Gang Kostka. They make spending money by robbery, even invading a grocery, engage in shootouts with police officers, and kill at will. After one of their members is rubbed out, their leader, called Bossing, decides that they should focus on only bigtime jobs. They target the Central Bank but Bossing is caught and lands in jail for close to three decades. Upon his release, his gangmates request that they divide the loot but Bossing claims that the police took it. The gang members start getting killed, starting with Porkchop, who impregnated Bossing’s girlfriend Diding while he was in jail. A mentally unstable grandmother reports the events to the police, and their involvement strains relations within the community.

Ang Pamilyang Kumakain ng Lupa was barely noticed in the Philippines and would have been completely forgotten had its director not thought of commemorating its 20th anniversary with a modest rescreening. Asian Movie Pulse ran a reappraisal by Epoy Deyto that remarked how its digital video technology invests it with “both datedness and foresight that makes it more exciting to see today.” The implication is that its original exhibition in foreign film festivals bewildered its audiences—an effect that Khavn may have aimed for. No other local filmmaker has dared to be as thematically unruly and formally audacious, with a visionary reimagining of the metropolis as “Mondomanila” (an infernal counterparting of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County). APKnL serves its three-square-meals structure with a helping of surrealist abjection in excessive degrees. The medium could only bear so much at this stage in its development, so at one point the screen yields to swirling abstractions; those willing to savor the experience will be rewarded with provocative insights and barbed humor, sometimes with extended payoffs: the family’s meals may not look like they literally contain soil, but the final treat prepared by the mother plays on the baby’s cockfight role, which is colloquially called “Kristo” because of the way that bookies extend their arms to signal the bettors. About a decade later, Ang Napakaigsing Buhay ng Alipato had a limited theatrical run, boosted by the triumph of Balangiga: Howling Wilderness. ANBnA partakes of many of the same elements of its predecessor, with several crucial twists. Digital media had advanced to the point where it could supplant celluloid film, and Khavn attained enough rapport with local talents and skill in offbeat storytelling. Proof of this might require either attentive viewing or a second screening, since the surface details occasionally refuse to be restrained by realist principles, and the historical past remains imbricated as well: “Alipato” was the well-known alias of Luis Taruc, who led the Philippines’s mid-century resistance to Japanese occupation as well as the postwar peasant rebellion. The film’s strategic shift might be more definitely marked with its narrative ellipsis, when the young hoodlums transition into wasted grownups who welcome their leader’s release from prison. At this point their decisions understandably become more deliberate and their actions more carefully planned, with the narrative becoming more naturally focalized (even when a black goat’s head assumes an omniscient-observer function at one point); the movie’s genre roots thereby become apparent, but rather than looking for ways to hide them or resist them, the film embraces and nurtures these elements and extends this same generosity of spirit to characters who were introduced as too callow and intractable in their early years to worry over. An impressive achievement by any standard, worth one’s attention especially during moments when daring and sophistication are in short measure anywhere else.

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Pusong Wazak: Isa Na Namang Kwento ng Pag-ibig sa Pagitan ng Kriminal at Puta

English Title: Ruined Heart: Another Lovestory Between a Criminal & a Whore
Additional Languages: German, Japanese, Spanish, French (in song lyrics)
Year of Release: 2014
Director & Screenwriter: Khavn
Producer: Kamias Road & Rapid Eye Movies

Cast: Tadanobu Asano, Nathalia Acevedo, Elena Kazan, Brenda Mage, Mico Madrid, Vim Nadera, Long, Jocas Ortiz, Mark Anthony Robrigado, Lhie Santos, Marvin Muñoz, Andre Puertollano, Khavn, Ymi Kris, Edgar Noble, Daizuki Laxa, Vincent Cando, Cristy Atienza, Christoff Ken, Allen Fuertes Lopez

The Criminal, apparently a Japanese living in the slums of Manila, contends with the conflicts among various gangs without hesitating to resort to violence. He maintains a Lover but falls in love with a Prostitute, while a “GodFather” hovers in their presence, reciting verses. Their lives of crime, betrayal, and reprisal proceed apace as expected in the underworld, intercalated with desperately lighthearted musical celebrations, until one day the Criminal finds and follows an unusual winged figure wandering in a cemetery.

The breakout works of Khavn, periodizable at about a decade in the past, remain suspended because of a predicament peculiar to his stature as a globally recognized indie-cinema figure: he may be able to solicit funding from overseas sources, but the material he works with is so insistently and specifically culture-based that foreign evaluators, even those receptive to his output, never truly get what they’re about. Hence the positive responses to Pusong Wazak predictably ascribe its triumph to Christopher Doyle (famed for his association with Wong Kar-Wai), with snide remarks on the order that he’d done better work in the past. The misgivings do have a foundation in Pusong Wazak’s approach to narrative storytelling, although it typifies Khavn’s strategic reliance on genre elements and fierce affection for Pinoy lumpenproles; it may be more accurate to maintain that Doyle has rarely had the cinematographic opportunities that he realized in this undertaking. For a more definitive basis of comparison, one could consider Tropical Manila, made in 2008 by Lee Sang-woo, an associate of Kim Ki-duk: the spectacle of a Korean gangster trying to blend in a local slum raises too many verisimilitudinous issues that defeat the film even after it has fully explicated his presence. In contrast, Tadanobu Asano only needs to insinuate, via his presence, the hundred-plus features where he played variations on his character (for example in Miike Takashi’s Ichi the Killer, 2001), then openly revel in the circumstances that even locals might find too anarchic for everyday survival; he may sport a broken arm, for example, but he uses it to paint, and later flees from gangsters while taking a video selfie with the same appendage. Nothing is too wild or strange for this assemblage of people, and their casual acceptance of copulation and bloodletting, accompanied by expertly wrought tunes that range from tacky to discordant to sublime, build up to a vision that might be the fulfillment of Celso Ad. Castillo’s carnivalesque fabulations but stakes its own claim on the national imaginary nevertheless.

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Desaparadiso: Corrido at Buhay na Pinagdaanan nang Tatlong Principeng Magcacapatid na Anac nang Haring Fernando at nang Reina Valeriana sa Cahariang Berbania

English Title: Desaparadiso: Corrido and the Lives Lived of the Three Prince Brothers, Children of King Fernando and Queen Valeriana of the Kingdom of Berbania
Year of Release: 2015 / Color with B&W and Sepia
Director & Screenwriter: Khavn
Adopted from the folk tale Ibong Adarna: Corrido at Buhay na Pinagdaanan nang Tatlong Principeng Magcacapatid na Anac nang Haring Fernando at nang Reina Valeriana sa Cahariang Berbania and from Jose F. Lacaba’s “Ang mga Nawawala (The Disappeared)” from Sa Panahon ng Ligalig: Tula, Awit, Halaw (In a Time of Turmoil: Poems, Songs, Adaptations (Anvil, 1991); title from a poem by Frank Cimatu; translations by Jose F. Lacaba & Dodo Dayao
Producer: Kamias Overground & Hubert Bals Fund

Cast: Dante Perez, Chris Pasturan, Raye Lucero, Ian Lomongo, Albert Valencia, Kayla Miller, Laiza Solasco, Abby Poblador, Alex Crisologo, Luis de Belen, Albert Valencia, Shun Villalobos, Wilson Quintero, Padeys Revilleza Cojano, Clarence Joy de Guzman, Renz Marie Nollase, Pinky Lamasan, Dan Palacpac

During the era of enforced peace and order imposed by Ferdinand E. Marcos’s declaration of martial law in 1972, a working-class family endures the news of the disappearance of their eldest son by conducting as much normality as they could endure. Titles tell the story, since the family members maintain absolute silence: Pedro, eldest son of Fernando and Valeriana, disappears on the date that Executive Order 1081 is announced; on the first anniversary of his disappearance, the second son, Diego, leaves home to search for his brother; two more years afterward, the youngest, Juan, does the same. Dressed as a wandering prince, Juan finds himself in an enchanted forest where he continues to seek his brothers, encountering along the way a leprous hunchback as well as his mother as Queen Adarna, who sings a string of well-known kundimans (folk-music ballads).

The authenticity of lived experience during a period of fascist rule in a culture like the Philippines’s rests with a steadily depleting number of survivors. The regime’s panoptic reach, for one thing, could make use of advances in surveillance technology as well the old standbys of informers and eavesdroppers. Along with the trauma of losing a loved one to a possibly indeterminate fate, the response of silence as a means of coping with heartbreak has never been depicted before or since in the few local treatments of the era, but its veracity can be affirmed in several accounts, notably the Quimpo family’s Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years (Anvil, 2012). Desaparadiso operates as an ambitious intertextual attempt to interweave recent history with the Adarna Bird folktale, familiar to all schooled Filipinos, with several adjustments and reversals, then laces the narrative overreach with popular music from the intervening decades. The effect would be absurd and laughable to viewers clueless about Philippine history and structures of feeling, but proof of how well it works lies in what is far and away the most effective cinematic rendition of the well-known protest warhorse “Bayan Ko” (“My Country,” Constancio de Guzmán & José Corazón de Jesús, 1929).

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Balangiga: Howling Wilderness

Language: Waray
Additional Languages: Cebuano, English
Year of Release: 2017
Director: Khavn
Screenwriters: Jerry Gracio, Khavn, Achinette Villamor
Producer: Kamias Overground

Cast: Justine Samson, Pio del Rio, Althea Vega, Warren Tuaño, Daniel Palisa, Jun Sabayton, Lourd de Veyra, Roxlee

Kulas and his grandfather flee the US Army’s retaliation for the Filipino revolutionaries’ attack on their camp at Balangiga. They aim to go to Kulas’s parents at Quinapondan, avoiding even worse conflict at Borlongan. Along the way, Kulas takes along a toddler, Bola, the only survivor of a village massacred by the Americans. Kulas takes upon himself the challenge of keeping together Bola (whom he calls his brother), his grandfather, his pet chicken, and his water buffalo Melchora, but the ravages of war insist on drawing his attention to the reality of apocalyptic suffering and death.

Khavn had been known as one of the few Filipino directors better known outside his home country. Because of the receptiveness of foreign film festivals to his output, he managed to become the country’s most prolific auteur, with (as of 2018) over 50 feature films and 100 short films in less than a quarter-century, including the longest-ever Pinoy movie, the 13-hour Simulacrum Tremendum (2016), by his own account a “poetic documentary.” In the past few years, however, his punk aesthetic’s anarchic-yet-romantic anti-authoritarian thrust started exhibiting an accessibility to local mass audiences, duly noted by online commentators. Mondomanila: Kung Paano Ko Inayos ang Buhok Ko Matapos ang Mahaba-Haba Ring Paglalakbay (Mondomanila, or: How I Fixed My Hair after a Rather Long Journey) won major awards as a work-in-progress at the 2010 Cinemanila International Film Festival, just as Balangiga: Howling Wilderness first earned raves as a three-hour festival cut, then swept both the top prizes of the local critics and original academy award-giving bodies as a two-hour intermediate version, before finally being released as a 1.5-hour feature. Also worth watching are Pusong Wazak: Isa Na Namang Kwento ng Pag-ibig sa Pagitan ng Kriminal at Puta (Ruined Heart: Another Lovestory between a Criminal and a Whore) from 2014, and what may be the closest to an anarchist local feature, Ang Napakaigsing Buhay ng Alipato from 2016. Balangiga holds its own place in the Khavn oeuvre by providing a more accessible (though still painful and rage-filled) account of an eight-year-old’s coming-of-age during the historical moment when the US openly showed its genocidal intentions toward a local population bent on resisting its colonial agenda. Ravishing landscapes strewn with human and animal remains, dreams whose surrealist content turns nightmarish, specters of the deceased who insist on mingling with the living: these announce the unexpected emergence of a fully formed and fearless artistic intelligence, ready to take his place in the crowded (though rarely intensely gifted) field of populist filmmaking.

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