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Khavn

Khavn

Directing

Biography

Khavn, originally named Khavn de la Cruz, is a very outspoken, experimental filmmaker. He has directed over 100 films, making him one of the most productive filmmakers in the Philippines, and far beyond. He also heads up Kamias Overground, an independent publishing company, and works as a composer, songwriter, pianist and writer. Since 2002, he has been director of the .MOV International Film, Music & Literature Festival. As a jury member, he has been present at multiple festivals, including Berlinale and the Leipzig Film Festival.

Known For

Ruined Heart: Another Lovestory Between a Criminal & a Whore
6.1

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.

Ruined Heart: Another Lovestory Between a Criminal & a Whore

2014
Esoterica: Manila
N/A

Drawing from his personal adventures, film director, Elwood Perez veers away from standard-issue plot conventions in this paradoxically moral tale of a young man en route to becoming a creative artist.

Esoterica: Manila

2014
Rizal's Makamisa: Phantasm of Revenge
N/A

In this whimsical historical fresco, a counterpoint to today’s urgent political issues, the figure of the Filipino revolutionary Rizal is revisited in the light of early silent films.

Rizal's Makamisa: Phantasm of Revenge

2024
Nitrate: To the Ghosts of the 75 Lost Philippine Silent Films (1912-1933)
9.5

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.

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

2023
Three Days of Darkness
2.0

Girls are hidden in a dark room.

Three Days of Darkness

2007
Philippine New Wave: This Is Not a Film Movement
4.8

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

Philippine New Wave: This Is Not a Film Movement

2010
Todo Todo Teros
5.2

Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.

Todo Todo Teros

2006
Son of God
N/A

The directors want to shoot a film about a man known as the son of god. But what starts out as a practical joke, extends to become a curious portrait of what could either be a petty fraud or the world’s most secret miracle. A film crew tracks his bizarre pilgrimage as magic and religion, faith and doubt, real and unreal blur and melt to the point that one of the director becomes one of the characters. The film traverses all descriptions, before ending as both an affirmation of faith for the faithless and a criticism of faith for the overly faithful.

Son of God

2010
No image
8.0

EDSA XXX takes us on a wild ride through the ups and downs, twists and turns in the life of one man’s downfall and the rise to fame of another. The present leader KULOG NEGRO has led the country to progress; his rallying call is championing poverty for the benefit of tourists and film festivals. But the well-meaning leader is a mere puppet in the political arena and someone has just decided that he has to go.

EDSA XXX: Nothing Ever Changes in the Ever-Changing Republic of Ek-Ek-Ek

2012
Ultimo
N/A

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.

Ultimo

2008
The Family That Eats Soil
5.5

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

The Family That Eats Soil

2005
Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember
6.4

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.

Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember

2016
Bamboo Dogs
4.3

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

Bamboo Dogs

2018
Years When I Was a Child Outside
N/A

Filmmaker John Torres describes his childhood and discusses his father's infidelities.

Years When I Was a Child Outside

2008
Last Take, Last Shot
10.0

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.

Last Take, Last Shot

2005
Skylab
N/A

The year is 1979, the Skylab satellite is falling to Earth. In the days leading up to the crash, two troubled boys wait for doomsday, only to realize that darker forces are threatening them.

Skylab

2021
KULOB34
8.0

Kulob is everyone who believes in nothing

KULOB34

2020
Orphea
4.0

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

Orphea

2021
A Short Film About the Indio Nacional
6.7

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 Short Film About the Indio Nacional

2005
Balangiga: Howling Wilderness
9.0

1901, Balangiga. Eight-year-old Kulas flees town with his grandfather and their carabao to escape General Smith's Kill & Burn order. He finds a toddler amid a sea of corpses and together, the two boys struggle to survive the American occupation.

Balangiga: Howling Wilderness

2017