http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/en/IFFR-2009/films-az/film.aspx?ID=9b985323-3da5-45b0-814f-5427d9bfb0a8

THREE DAYS OF DARKNESS
This is not a film by Khavn

It made the censors in the Philippines stutter. The filmmaker, in his vision of the Apocalypse as experienced by three women locked in a ghostly house, was not only inspired by horror, but also by porn films. You have been warned.

It was said of the most productive Dutch novelist Simon Vestdijk that he could write faster than God could read. You could say of Khavn that he makes films faster than God can watch. In his speed and productivity, Khavn made Three Days of Darkness twice: the first time with young actresses and afterwards (this film) with more experienced ones in all respects. So it’s a remake of his own film. And the remake is better – or maybe the remake is the original.
The background for the film was borrowed from a text from the New Testament book of Revelations, the mystical and apocalyptic predictions by the apostle John. When the day of divine revenge comes, three days of darkness will fall over the earth. When three women are together in what is undoubtedly a haunted house, the lights fail during the divine storm. Demons emerge in all kinds of forms in the darkness. Fear, yet strikingly also enjoyment, overwhelms the women. This is the start of strange, bloodcurdling and erotic events. The film does not only borrow its inspiration from horror films, but also from porn. As the end approaches, apparently unbridled powers break free; the women surrender themselves entirely to their lusts.
In the Philippines, the censor had no words to describe the alleged filth. However, supporters immediately hailed the film as a cult classic. (Gertjan Zuilhof)

Director Khavn De La Cruz
Producer Khavn De La Cruz
Scenario Aloy Adlawan, Khavn De La Cruz
Cast Katya Santos
Gwen Garci
Precious Adona
Bugz Daigo
Photography Albert Banzon
Editor Lawrence S. Ang
Art design Jeck Cogama
Length 81′

THEMES
2009 Signals: Hungry Ghosts
Horror films and more. The ghosts in these Asian films are real. Viewers and makers certainly believe in them.

SCREENINGS
Cinerama 7 Fri 23 Jan 17:15
Venster 2 Tue 27 Jan 22:30

http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/en/IFFR-2009/films-az/film.aspx?ID=ee2b6bc6-f9d3-446f-98e2-dcfde6cc4560

THE MIDDLE MYSTERY OF KRISTO NEGRO
This is not a film by Khavn

Maybe animal lovers should come in ten minutes too late. Yet the ritual slaughter of a young water buffalo is a powerful start to a sombre and nightmarish film about the Passion of Christ. No, it doesn’t look like that are the film. This Christ has no idea either.

Not everyone can cope with it, but the film opens with what should be an age-old ritual. Several men slaughter and skin an animal in the open field. It’s a young water buffalo that continues to breathe when it hardly has any skin left. The landscape has a biblical appeal and the people are dressed in timeless garb. Less timeless are the Roman legionaries who appear and disappear. A Christ-like figure is left on his own in the empty landscape and starts dragging the carcass of the water buffalo as if it were his cross. He seems to carry all his sins through a hellish landscape that looks as if it were designed in a feverish dream.
Without the Catholic Church, there probably wouldn’t be any such thing as a cult film. The old, theatrical and mystical rituals of the church are a never-ending source of inspiration for film makers who are sensitive to a similarly hysterical rapture or who want to mock the conservative institution.
Although you could expect it from an outspokenly underground film maker like Khavn, in this case one cannot really talk about direct mockery of religion. Is it’s more that he takes the element of self chastising that is part of certain rituals (such as the acted Way of the Cross) one step further and makes the ritual more real than was maybe intended.
The Hungry Ghosts programme also includes the director’s Three Days of Darkness. (Gertjan Zuilhof)

Director Khavn De La Cruz
Producer Khavn De La Cruz
Scenario Khavn De La Cruz
Cast Macoy Duran
Mary Tamayo
Kat Sandoval
Photography Albert Banzon
Editor Lawrence S. Ang
Art design Kristine Kintana, Ma. Krissna Isabelle Cruz, Michelle Ann Frazier, Gladys Melgarejo, Jet Leyco
Length 70′

THEMES
2009 Spectrum
Rotterdam on the wide side. The festival selected topical, powerful and innovative work of the past year by well-known faces and possibly less well-known directors from all four corners of the world.

SCREENINGS
Cinerama 7 Sat 24 Jan 17:15
Lantaren 2 Tue 27 Jan 20:15
Zaal De Unie Fri 30 Jan 19:45

http://berlinale.de/en/presse/pressemitteilungen/kurzfilm/kurzfilm-presse-detail.html

Jan 12, 2009

Berlinale Shorts: 28 Wilful, Disturbing and/or Mollifying Ways to Regard the World

A top-notch international jury – with actress Arta Dobroshi from Kosovo, director of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Lars Henrik Gass, and Philippine director Khavn de la Cruz – will pick the award winners in this year’s short film section. The Berlinale Shorts will screen 28 films from 17 countries, eleven of which will be running in the Competition, and vying for the Golden and Silver Bears for Best Short Film. The entire programme automatically qualifies for the DAAD Short Film Prize and receives a nomination for Best European Short Film. Markus Kavka will present the awards in CinemaxX3 on February 10.

Germany is making a strong showing this year with five formally complex films. In Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller’s new film contre-jour, “the way we regard the world and how it regards us in return breaks into disturbing fragments” (K. Tieke). Humorous in the telling, but formally more reticent is Lola Randl’s Die Leiden des Herrn Karpf. Der Geburtstag – a short film about the loneliness and estrangement of the urban individual. Three wilful productions underscore the specialness of Belgium’s narrative culture. And then there’s the East, which is not a country, but a direction. This trend is illustrated by Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s Diagnoz from the Ukraine and Alexander Karavayev’s Devyat proloyotov vmeste from the Russian Federation, which depict the current political and economic situation in very different ways, as well as Jan Andersen’s vostok’ from France, whose title is already programmatic.

David OReilly, who won Special Mention in last year’s Short Film Competition, is back with his new digital animation Please Say Something, a film about a relationship of another kind. In Birth, Signe Baumane shows how being pregnant can feel. The Indonesian film Trip to the Wound by Edwin, who is a member of this year’s Forum NETPAC jury, will screen out of competition. The film is an artistic and political statement on the freedom of art in times of radical censorship.

The Berlinale Shorts is pleased to announce that the winner of the Prix UIP at the 2008 Berlinale, Darren Thorton’s Frankie (Ireland), won Best European Short Film at the European Film Awards in Copenhagen in December 2008.

The Berlinale Shorts jury:

Khavn De La Cruz (Philippines)
With more than 70 short films and features, this director is one of his country’s most important underground digital filmmakers. De La Cruz, who participated in the Berlinale Talent Campus 2005, is also a writer and musician, as well as director of the Philippine MOV International Digital Film Festival. With his production company Filmless Films, he has made many works, including Mondomanila: Institute of Poets, a surreal cinematic reflection on Philippine society. Read More »

f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g
world cinema in Los Angeles and beyond

http://filmjourney.weblogger.com/2009/01/15/robert-koehlers-best-of-2008/

Khavn’s “Manila In The Fangs Of Darkness” is one of Robert Koehler’s Best of 2008

The Golden Age Continued: The Films That Matter in 2008

By ROBERT KOEHLER
January 15th, 2009

It’s always dangerous to assume anything, but I figured that by now I would have been teased—somewhere, by someone—for having argued more than once over the past couple of years that we are living in a new golden age of film. This position runs so counter to the prevailing mood and sentiment (dour may be one word to describe it) that I know more than ever that I’m right, just as I know that such a contrarian position opens one up for attack. Hasn’t happened. Yet. Maybe it will this time, especially when some films that seem so wildly and widely loved aren’t listed among the year’s films that matter (say, for the helluva it, WALL-E). Perhaps part of the reason for the critical exercise in listing a year’s survey of films is to offer a counter to the pack mentality that swamps North American movie criticism today. (Not a golden age there.) But the central reason is to stake a position in the field of cinema, to defend it, to cite the films made by filmmakers who fathom that we’ve entered a time where cinema’s essence of a greater understanding and feeling for reality through image and sound, a time that runs full circle to the silent era, liberated from literature, from theater, from all of those alien projects that have nothing to do with cinema. Read More »