Nitrate: To the Ghosts of the 75 Lost Philippine Silent Films (1912-1933)

A black comedy film, which focuses on two film workers, Raffy, the clapper, and Dido, a utility boy. Both share the same dream: to direct their own films someday. Their lives as mere "small production people" took a different turn when, together with the people in the unit van they were riding,had an encounter with armed men. Their co-workers were killed, and the two of them were forced to drive the unit van out of fear until it ran out of gas. The van contains equipment for movie production like cameras, lights and film stocks. They ended up in a secluded barrio not yet reached by modern technology, and therefore, the townsfolk knew nothing of the movie industry.

The start of the film sets the tone. A tortured man looks as if he will castrate himself. Later he staggers aimlessly and bleeding heavily through the streets of a town that is just waking up. In parallel, the film shows the marital discussions of a couple, with the husband hiding behind the camera.

Kulob is everyone who believes in nothing

What follows is a black-and-white silent film set in the 1890s during the brewing Filipino revolution against Spanish colonialism. A series of tragic and comic sequences tells the Three Ages of an Indio (“common man”) as he progresses from boy bell ringer in a village church to teenage revolutionary to adult theater actor rehearsing a popular Spanish play.

A bunch of 10-year-old kids rob pedestrians and kill without a mercy. But after a failed bank robbery, the dangerous game comes to an end with twenty years of imprisonment. After two decades, they are released but soon begin to disappear one by one.

Somewhere in Manila, a crime boss rules with an iron fist. To his most loyal henchman he gives the task of guarding his woman. Before long, she falls in love with the henchman, and the star-crossed lovers decide to leave town. Fighting ensues. It is while on the run that they finally get to know each other for the first time.

A strange and dysfunctional family sits down three times a day to a meal of soil.

Mondomanila tells the story of teenage anti-hero Tony de Guzman and the rough neighborhood he calls home.

Documentary profiling the directors involved in the loose Philippine New Wave filmmaking movement.

This is not a film by Khavn. A crime-thriller retro-road movie based on the Kuratong Baleleng Rubout Massacre of 1995.

A reinvention of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in contemporary Manila as a rock musical.

Girls are hidden in a dark room.

A touching ode to Leonardo de la Cruz, the filmmaker's late father, who died earlier this year of lung cancer at the age of 65, the film is a personal meditation of sorts. It is at once dark, yet not unrelieved by poetry on the mysteries of life, existence and mortality.

“Double, double, toil and trouble,” indeed! Shakespeare’s punchiest tragedy gets a makeover in a way that only the prodigious Filipino multi-hyphenate Khavn De La Cruz could deliver. Unfolding in the Municipality of Marcos, Ilocos Norte and Khavn’s own Burroughsian Interzone of Mondomanila – also the title of the director’s crazed horror-comedy-crime drama, which premiered at IFFR 2012 – this mash-up of styles, genres, moods and atmospheres features a cast of over 100 performers and defies any easy description, even with so familiar a text. But as Khavn says of his source material, "Usually, word is king. Here, text is just one of the many cogs. It’s a column, a roof shingle, an ornament."

The filmmaker is fairly young, otherwise you could say this extremely long film is Khavn’s life's work. Because it is so long and the maker is Filipino, you might think he is following in the footsteps of Lav Diaz, but this is very different, more experimental, documentary-surrealistic cinema. A collection of images like Jonas Mekas also makes, although Manila is not New York. Khavn started shooting this diary 22 years ago, and in the course of time he has made recordings with all sorts of cameras, from analogue video8 via mini-DV to iPhone. He does not present the recordings in chronological order, however.

To reimage, rewrite, and reread my country’s bastard history, using dismembered icons and scenographies that both affirm and negate remembered mythology.