Can & Slippers

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

Lost cinema. Lost culture. Lost country. Lost people. How to recreate the past with nothing? Cinema of the impossible. The silent past is a horror film. The smell of nitrate in the morning. How many ghosts can the cinema contain? 75 films. 22 years. What is the numerological significance? Too late. Never too late.

KULOB34

Kulob is everyone who believes in nothing

Headless

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.

Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember

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.

Ruined Heart: Another Lovestory Between a Criminal & a Whore

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.

The Family That Eats Soil

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

Mondomanila: Kung paano ko inayos ang buhok ko matapos ang mahaba-haba ring paglalakbay

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

Orphea

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

Three Days of Darkness

Girls are hidden in a dark room.

Cameroon Love Letter (For Solo Piano)

Love letters from a relationship between Cameroon and the Philippines.

Ultimo

Farewell, to all I love. To die is to rest, writes Jose Rizal, and where his poem ends, "Ultimo" begins. It is a black-and-white silent film, with scenes from the director's meanderings in La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain) inspired by Rizal's poem, which was written a day before the hero's execution in 1896. It explores identity and nationhood as viewed through a post-colonial lens.

Simulacrum Tremendum

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.

Gunam- Gunam X Guni Guni

The amazing adventures of Gunam-gunam (Rumi) and Guni-guni (Phantasm). Adapted from the book Auxiliary Materials for Teaching the Filipino Language by Kelly Sta. Ana Nicolas (Philippine Normal College, 1964).

Three Days Of Darkness Zero

The "prequel" to "Three Days Of Darkness" aka "Tatlong Araw Ng Kadiliman" starring Katya Santos, Gwen Garci, and Precious Adona. Khavn draws on the Book of Revelation for one of the most frightening phenomenon prophesied to happen. Three girls are trapped in their home as the Three Days of Darkness descend on the Earth and they must cope and try to fend off the demons that have come to take them. A chilling vision of God's Wrath or of people imposing God's Wrath on one another, the film frightens with its questions as much as it does with its visuals.

Makbetamaximus

“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."

Old East Side

Fast forwarding through Batang West Side.