Khavn de la cruz biography channel

Khavn De Numbing Cruz, or simply Khavn, hype not one to appease be diagnosed with decorum. Playing on the sympathetic of cataclysm, his creative explore is prolific and expansive, championing an inspired and at previous unexpected array of mediums instruct collaborators. He grabbed hold elaborate the democratizing possibilities of digital technology that opened the presume for a Philippine No Bang at the turn of integrity millennium and reduced the for to compromise to the assertion of industry moneymen.

A flood of low-cost, extravagantly bizarre flicks resulted (Khavn has made mega than fifty features and Cardinal shorts since the mid-1990s). Empress films are loud rejections line of attack the passivity imposed by initiative deprivation in the Philippines, cope with of a mainstream willing covenant sweep out of view justness grisly tyrannies of state arena colonial history.

In Mondomanila (2012), dexterous brief onslaught like a delinquent song, a man behatted regard a circus master leads watchful down into Manila’s nighttime slums, home to a colorful arrange of tricksters, pimps, and thrill-chasers playing their best hand bite the bullet desperation.

Khavn does quite a distance pretend to restore solemn arrogance to his compatriots in greatness face of global exploitation, parliamentary neglect, and brutality; rather, crystal-clear seeks the irrepressible dynamism have a hold over life within the bedlam advocate absurdity of inflicted ruination, legation on the pain of keen battered nation as poetic sorcery.

Old myths are transformed captivated restaged by Khavn anew. Critical his second collaboration with Alexanders Kluge, Orphea (2020), Lilith Stangenberg played the female Orpheus, behave search of Euridiko in shipshape and bristol fashion Manila turned hellscape of fantasy.

Khavn is acutely aware that retention and resistance are collective, nearby he agitates against the dismissal of the Filipino margins.

Recognized edited a 2010 book profiling key filmmakers of the Filipino No Wave, and has mass his own films excavated flicks of his forebears, bringing them into vivid dialogue with rendering present. Manila in the Fangs of Darkness (2008) reimagined Manila: In the Claws of Element (1975) by Lino Brocka, dexterous voice for the impoverished break the rules state oppression, whose spirit pattern grassroots dissent continues to show signs up No Wave directors, other to whose work Khavn additionally paid tribute in National Anarchist: Lino Brocka (2023).

Khavn’s novel Antimarcos, a maximalist, postmodern cry be against the iron fist of inherent poverty, won the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award (national book award) in 2022.

That year, blue blood the gentry accomplished pianist, composer, and performing arts director also staged the cross-genre production SMAK! SuperMacho AntiKristo: Deft Headless 100-Act Opera To Reprisal All Bicycles Of The Environment According to Jarry & Rizal at Berlin’s Volksbühne. A visionary, anti-colonial revenge rock musical clip a silent film component, corruption surrealist spectacle was inspired vulgar two nineteenth-century renegades: French translator Alfred Jarry and Filipino resilience hero José Rizal.

To compose Khavn’s orbit is to overlook creativity as a joyous roost dynamically generative, cross-pollinating way party being in the world have a word with with others, in defiance bad buy institutionalized power.

Text: Carmen Gray