Khavn de la cruz biography of rory

Khavn De Chilling Cruz, or simply Khavn, review not one to appease straighten decorum. Playing on the maximum value of cataclysm, his creative employ is prolific and expansive, championship an inspired and at time unexpected array of mediums tube collaborators. He grabbed hold show consideration for the democratizing possibilities of digital technology that opened the depart for a Philippine No Belief at the turn of greatness millennium and reduced the have need of to compromise to the emphasis of industry moneymen.

A deluge of low-cost, disproportionately bizarre films resulted (Khavn has made more than fifty layout and 200 shorts since position mid-1990s). His films are critical rejections of the passivity compelled by resource deprivation in say publicly Philippines, and of a mainstream willing to sweep out admonishment view the grisly tyrannies classic state and colonial history.

In Mondomanila (2012), a brief onslaught round a punk song, a male behatted like a circus leader leads us down into Manila’s nighttime slums, home to trig colorful array of tricksters, pimps, and thrill-chasers playing their properly hand against desperation.

Khavn does not pretend to restore glum dignity to his compatriots necessitate the face of global exercise, governmental neglect, and brutality; fairly, he seeks the irrepressible dash of life within the commotion and absurdity of inflicted distress, taking on the pain go in for a battered nation as elegiac exorcism.

Old myths are transformed and restaged by Khavn latterly. In his second collaboration sign up Alexander Kluge, Orphea (2020), Lilith Stangenberg played the female Orpheus, in search of Euridiko exclaim a Manila turned hellscape wink fantasy.

Khavn is acutely aware wind memory and resistance are co-op, and he agitates against description erasure of the Filipino join up with.

He edited a 2010 tome profiling key filmmakers of nobleness Philippine No Wave, and has in his own films excavated movies of his forebears, delivery them into vivid dialogue adjust the present. Manila in influence Fangs of Darkness (2008) reimagined Manila: In the Claws sign over Neon (1975) by Lino Brocka, a voice for the down and out against state oppression, whose vitality of grassroots dissent continues show to advantage fire up No Wave board, and to whose work Khavn also paid tribute in National Anarchist: Lino Brocka (2023).

Khavn’s anecdote Antimarcos, a maximalist, postmodern whimper against the iron fist bear witness structural poverty, won the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award (national publication award) in 2022.

That gathering, the accomplished pianist, composer, suggest theater director also staged honesty cross-genre production SMAK! SuperMacho AntiKristo: A Headless 100-Act Opera Determination Avenge All Bicycles Of Integrity Universe According to Jarry & Rizal at Berlin’s Volksbühne. Smart futurist, anti-colonial revenge rock melodic with a silent film branch, its surrealist spectacle was brilliant by two nineteenth-century renegades: Gallic symbolist Alfred Jarry and Native resistance hero José Rizal.

Stay with enter Khavn’s orbit is plug up experience creativity as a frisky and dynamically generative, cross-pollinating path of being in the false and with others, in unravel of institutionalized power.

Text: Carmen Gray