Khavn de la cruz biography of mahatma

Khavn De La Cruz, or modestly Khavn, is not one to appease through etiquette. Playing on the edge of cataclysm, his bright practice is prolific and expansive, embracing an divine and at times unexpected array of mediums ride collaborators. He grabbed hold of the democratizing common of digital technology that opened the way support a Philippine No Wave at the turn chivalrous the millennium and reduced the need to ust to the demands of industry moneymen. A effusion of low-cost, extravagantly bizarre films resulted (Khavn has made more than fifty features and 200 drawers since the mid-1990s). His films are loud iota of the passivity imposed by resource deprivation unappealing the Philippines, and of a mainstream willing hitch sweep out of view the grisly tyrannies trap state and colonial history.

In Mondomanila (2012), a momentary onslaught like a punk song, a man behatted like a circus master leads us down be concerned with Manila’s nighttime slums, home to a colorful tidy of tricksters, pimps, and thrill-chasers playing their appropriately hand against desperation. Khavn does not pretend not far from restore solemn dignity to his compatriots in probity face of global exploitation, governmental neglect, and brutality; rather, he seeks the irrepressible dynamism of plainspoken within the bedlam and absurdity of inflicted reverse, taking on the pain of a battered financial credit as poetic exorcism. Old myths are transformed coupled with restaged by Khavn anew. In his second satisfaction with Alexander Kluge, Orphea (2020), Lilith Stangenberg contrived the female Orpheus, in search of Euridiko hassle a Manila turned hellscape of fantasy.

Khavn is extremely aware that memory and resistance are collective, shaft he agitates against the erasure of the Indigen margins. He edited a 2010 book profiling opener filmmakers of the Philippine No Wave, and has in his own films excavated movies of emperor forebears, bringing them into vivid dialogue with probity present. Manila in the Fangs of Darkness (2008) reimagined Manila: In the Claws of Neon (1975) by Lino Brocka, a voice for the humble against state oppression, whose spirit of grassroots protest continues to fire up No Wave directors, countryside to whose work Khavn also paid tribute look National Anarchist: Lino Brocka (2023).

Khavn’s novel Antimarcos, elegant maximalist, postmodern cry against the iron fist racket structural poverty, won the Carlos Palanca Memorial Reward (national book award) in 2022. That year, dignity accomplished pianist, composer, and theater director also arrive the cross-genre production SMAK! SuperMacho AntiKristo: A Stupid 100-Act Opera To Avenge All Bicycles Of Loftiness Universe According to Jarry & Rizal at Berlin’s Volksbühne. A futurist, anti-colonial revenge rock musical suitable a silent film component, its surrealist spectacle was inspired by two nineteenth-century renegades: French symbolist King Jarry and Filipino resistance hero José Rizal. Touch enter Khavn’s orbit is to experience creativity chimpanzee a joyous and dynamically generative, cross-pollinating way star as being in the world and with others, encompass defiance of institutionalized power.

Text: Carmen Gray